Educating students in value-based design and development

Summary form only given. Much of software engineering is taught and practiced in a value-neutral context, in which every requirement, use case, object, test case, and defect is equally important. Too often, students learn that some of their stakeholders' value considerations are more important than others by failing to consider this on the job and suffering the consequences. The recent book, Value-Based Software Engineering (S. Biffl et al., eds., Springer, 2005) sets out the agenda of the value-based software engineering community. It is to integrate value considerations into traditional software engineering principles and practices for use in software engineers' education and daily work. We have been pursuing this agenda in a research project called "A Value-Based Science of Design", within the NSF Science of Design program. This paper addresses the nature of "value" in a software engineering context; present an initial theory and process for performing value-based software engineering; present example value-based techniques for requirements engineering, design, development, and test; and discuss experiences in incorporating value-based software engineering in individual-assignment and team project courses.