Revisiting Polya's approach to foster problem solving skill development in software engineers

A cardinal responsibility of a software engineer is to analyze a given problem and through semantic mapping, apply apropos techniques and constructs to develop viable software solutions. The dominant curriculum models for software engineers has focused on the solution space's declarative knowledge and has mostly relegated problem solving skills to that of a consequence of the primary educational process. In this paper we present a constructivist aware strategy to amend software engineering curricula by integrating problem solving skill development. To build this approach we examined mathematician Gyorgy Polya's heuristic of a generalized problem solving model in the context of software engineering (SE) and propose the necessary augmentation to support skill development. We take the position that Polya's approach may not only functionally address well defined problems encountered at an introductory level but is expandable to tackle ill-structured or wicked problems inherent in the design of complex systems. We present a controlled classroom study which investigates the utility of the proposed methodology to address a set of welldefined problems in a small representative student sampling. Our results show a significant reduction in time to solution given classroom support.