Can Software Engineering Students Program Defect-Free? An Educational Approach

Quality of software intensive systems is the priority concern and focus in industry and the research community. In practice, the increasing demand for experienced software developers in industry requires developers mature themselves in a timely manner to be able to produce high quality programs. It has become a realistic challenge to both software engineering educators and researchers. To address this challenge, we devised the PSP+ process, in particular for students majored in software engineering, that enhances the original PSP (Personal Software Process) with an ultimate goal at Defect-Free Programming (DFP). Based on the original PSP, the PSP+ incorporates a set of explicitly defined practices to facilitate experience gaining and sharing among students with the special concern on DFP. This paper elaborates the proposed PSP+ process and also reports a controlled experiment that was designed and executed to investigate the effectiveness of the PSP+ within an educational setting. The experiment results indicate that students using the PSP+ are more likely to perform high quality programming without extra effort. They also gain higher confidence with DFP compared to those using the original PSP.