Delivering Software Process-Specific Project Courses in Tertiary Education Environment: Challenges and Solution

The importance of delivering software process courses to software engineering students has been more and more recognized in China in recent years. However, students usually cannot fully appreciate the value of software process courses by only learning methodology and principle in the classroom. Therefore, a process-specific project course was designed to fill the gap between the software process theoretical and experiential knowledge. But to design the course also has many challenges, such as: to provide enough guideline for students; to monitor every process task; to gather and use the process data, especially considering the large class size. We designed a summer school 6-weeks project course in Nanjing University based on TSP (Team Software Process) methodology. To support the course, we developed a supporting tool, the Advance Process Improvement Solution (APIS), which can record and use historical data, support teamwork, and provide process data to both students and teachers in real time. This paper describes the methodology, course organization, supporting tool, and evaluation in details. Based on our two years' experience, this course plays a key role for SE students to better understand software process.