Student Perception of Software Engineering Factors Supported by Machine Learning

Software engineering education requires training in project management techniques in combination with intercultural communication skills to cooperate effectively in today's software development landscape. This poses a challenge to teach software engineering effectively in undergraduate courses for industry needs. International engineering study programs provide a unique opportunity to experience a software development process with participants from different cultures. For most students, English is not their native language, which reflects many distributed software engineering projects. This study surveyed 28 students from an international undergraduate engineering course in Japan on their perceived importance of software engineering factors and freeform text comments on their success, struggle, and critique within this course. A language model is trained using Word2Vec on the textual data to support the results of the perceived importance of software engineering factors.