An ongoing OO software engineering measurement experiment

This paper reports on an ongoing software measurement experiment which has been set up to monitor and evaluate team based student projects building object-oriented software. In this experiment, students are building the same system, in two languages (Eiffel and Smalltalk). Our process, called the Software Assessment Through Ongoing Profile Sheets (SATOPS) is being used in a project management framework to provide: a more objective feedback to improve students' learning; a method for measuring their understanding for grading purposes; and an instrument for making software engineering metrics measurements. We argue that SATOPS is the basis for reproducible software engineering experiments in a university environment.