Operation and Innovation of Software Engineering Education for Very Small Entities

Xue Han, Jianyong Yu＊

Abstract: This paper illustrates some exploration and innovation of software engineering education for VSEs under the background of Chinese "double first-class" new situation and new engineering subject, including academic strategy, curriculum system, ability training, teaching methods, project practice, and so on. Based on the actual situations and characteristics of Hunan University, this paper focuses on some undergraduate education practice, so that students can adapt software engineering development in VSEs with ISO/IEC 29110 series of standards and guides.

Keywords: software engineering education; very small entities; teaching methods; project practice;ISO/IEC 29110

1 Introduction

Software engineering is one of the fast growing professions in the world, and it is viewed as the cornerstone of many new technologies and new industry economies, e.g., AI, big data, cloud computing, robot, Internet industry, and so on. It is predicted from official United States government that there will be over average growth of 22% for job positions in the computer technology fields by the year 2020, especially with highest percentage growth in the software developers and systems software area[1]. The huge needs of software engineering talents have been urging the computer education to further develop and reform.

Nowadays, Small and Medium Enterprises(SMEs) and Very Small Entities (VSEs), have grown and strengthened,becoming one key elements in the consolidation of the software industry[2]. A large majority of organizations or project teams developing software are entities having up to 25 people. In Europe, for instance， over 92% of enterprises are called micro-enterprises, have up to 9 employees；6.5% have between 10 and 49 employees[3]. From the previous surveys and studies conducted, it was clear that software engineering life cycle standards, such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207[4],did not address the needs of VSEs. Most of VSEs did not have enough resources in terms of expertise and money to adapt heavy weight standards to meet their needs. In order to help SMEs and VSEs in the operation of best practices to improve product and service quality and process performance, standards such as ISO/IEC 29110 engineering and management guides were developed[5-6].

This work seeks to some explorations and innovations of software engineering education for VSEs under the background of Chinese "double firstclass" new situation and new engineering subject.Based on the actual situations and characteristics of our universities and colleges, this paper specially focuses on some undergraduate education practices of teaching ideas, teaching methods, curriculum system construction, engineering practices and talents' ability training, so that students can adapt software engineering development in VSEs with ISO/IEC 29110.

2 Background

The existing practice standards, such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207[4], focus on systems and software engineering life-cycle processes. These standards have been developed by large organizations unfamiliar with the specific needs of VSEs. They are not generally utilized by VSEs, and are seen as inappropriate.

The ISO/IEC 29110 series of standards and guides were specifically developed for VSEs developing software[7], but not critical software. Since the ISO/IEC 29110 is easily understandable and freely available, many countries are teaching and adopting the standards, for example, Colombia, Brazil, Haiti,Jordan, Mexico and Thailand, and so on[8]. More than 17 countries have adopted it as a national standard. It has been also used by many students to develop their first software products. Many VSEs are helped in the adoption, operation and certification activities with their government programs. Low cost independent certification and assessment schemes allow VSEs to demonstrate recognition of their competences to local and international customers and partners.

The goal of ISO/IEC 29110 is to give a solution related to the poor standard adoption in VSEs, and covering the specific needs of VSEs, such as risk levels,business models and situational factor[9]. The standard is organized by profiles: entry, basic, intermediate and advance. The paper focuses on the basic profile that targets VSEs developing a single software product by a simple work team. The basic profile is composed of two processes: the project management (PM) and the software implementation (SI). As illustrated in fig. 1, one customer provides a statement of work, or a description of the functionalities required within a specified time frame and budget, as an input to the PM process. Then a project plan guides SI process,including the execution of software requirements analysis, architecture and detailed design, construction,integration and tests, and product delivery activities.Finally, by means of the output of SI process, the PM process delivers the software configuration (e.g.,product, user documentation, code) to the customer,and obtains the customer's acceptance to finish the software project.

Fig. 1 Activities involved in two software engineering Basic prof le processes for VSEs [2].

3 Operation in Hunan University

3.1 Reform framework

On the basis of our country actual situations, the software engineering education for VSEs is in the stage of exploring and practice. Under the new engineering background, the training of software engineering talents has been put forward new requirements.

● The restructuration of knowledge system. Some engineering knowledge need to be updated to reflect technological development, increase interdisciplinary and integration with related majors and disciplines, and straighten out the relationships between professional knowledge, such as inheritance, cohesion, support features.

● Emphasis on the ability training. Ability training is fundamental, and it has higher requirements in new engineering field. This ability is also manifold,including computational thinking, system view,engineering development, etc. Especially, the training of engineering practice and innovation ability must be paid high attention.

● Improvement of teaching methods. The limitations of current educational ideas and teaching methods should be overcome. The advantages of information technology should be reflected to explore the talents training mode adapted to the new engineering education.

According to these new requirements, the overall reform framework is roughly built as follows.

● With regard to structure of software engineering knowledge, we update professional knowledge timely,reconstruct and build some curriculum groups, change the ways of teaching.

● With regard to the ability and quality of students and teachers, we reform practice contents, improve practice requirements, and explore the means of operation.

● With regard to teaching methods, we improve teaching ideas and teaching measures, build practice platform, integrate practice resources.

3.2 Academic strategy

In Hunan University, an academic group has been built to develop and adapt a core set of learning courses, engineering projects, teaching strategies and evaluation system for undergraduate education. The team is called as software engineering education and training (SWEET) group. Their research will create an integrated environment that urges a set of best practices, with respect to software engineering teaching techniques, processes, and courses. One of main goals of the group is to train undergraduates and master students in the ISO 29110.

3.3 Curriculum system

In comparison with some curriculum systems in Europe[10], we are trying some concrete reform measures. According to the training needs of professional talents and the development of professional technology, the knowledge structure of software engineering is partly adjusted. It is also improved by deleting, modifying and increasing some courses contents.

● Cutting off the knowledge that is out of date,no longer used or no longer practical. For example,in software engineering courses, we reduce some knowledge, such as waterfall model, data flow method,and so on.

● Cutting off the knowledge that is not closely related to professional education and ability training.The analog electronic technology and digital electronic technology should be deleted, since these are not related with software engineering.

● Removing the knowledge that is not necessary at the present stage. For example, process capability assessment and improvement should be deleted,because these knowledge depend on students' practice and experience in the future.

● Changing professional knowledge. Some knowledge points of related courses could be adjusted according to the professional characteristics. As to computer principle course, we use "computer system from the programmer's view point" as teaching material of "software engineering". The curriculum knowledge is adjusted, together with some teachers of "operating system" and "compiler principle" courses, in order to strengthen knowledge convergence of related courses.

● Improving professional knowledge. For example,the UML unified modeling language should be added as an advanced professional basic course of software engineering curriculum. Some knowledge and technology in the industry, such as open source software and software development based on swarm intelligence, should be added to the curriculum practices. Some practical knowledge and technology in the stage should be also added, e.g. continuous integration, distributed collaborative development, and so on.

3.4 Ability training

As to the ability, it should be mainly emphasized that the comprehensive quality training for the students'ability of software engineering development. In this respect, we are trying to build some software engineering course groups. The curriculum groups are designed to bring up students' practical abilities,including software engineering integrated practice,requirement engineering, software architecture design,software testing and verification, human-machine interaction, and some other courses. In these course groups, an unified design is carried out to design the course experiment under cross-curricular, and strengthen the training of the engineering practice abilities. The course groups will strengthen cohesion,and make quality awareness and requirements of software engineering to program structure and project analysis.

3.5 Teaching methods

As to teaching methods, the reform core of new engineering education is the practice teaching guided by the training of quality and ability. However, there are many problems in practice teaching mode, e.g.the limitation of operation space, the closeness of participants, the simplicity of auxiliary channels, and the limitation of practical resources. These result in higher demands for teacher's knowledge, experience and devotion. However, one idea could be enlightened,which is to use the Internet and the development of group intelligence, and to improve the practicality of engineering development. On this point, we are trying in the following ways.

● Leading the Internet public into practice teaching.The Internet comes together a large number of high level people. For example, the open source communities on the Internet collect many rich experienced software developers. Their discussion spaces provide with many valuable resources.

● Leading the Internet resources into practice teaching, and becoming learning objects. The Internet has gathered mass of high quality software resources,such as some open source software in software project hosting platforms. Community-based development can become an important engineering approach[11].

● Introducing the Internet platforms into practice teaching, and becoming practical platforms. We are trying to make full use of the Internet as the supporting platform for software collaborative development[12].Internet-based distributed collaborative development and version management control software, such as GitHub and Subversion, have attracted about 15 million users to participate in open source projects, many of which are excellent.

3.6 Project practice

The practice teaching on the series of software engineering courses is one important part of the training of software engineering talents. How to reform the practice teaching of software engineering in combination with the requirements of the new engineering subject, is one question worthy of exploring and thinking. By learning some precious experience,the design of software engineering courses practice tasks could be divided into two parts: ①Reading and improving of high quality open source software, and learning community product's experience and wisdom;②Opening some creative, large scale, high quality software project, and iterating the developed process by means of crowds wisdom and group products.

● The open source communities of the Internet have gathered a lot of high-level, well-worth learning software, such as Mi Notepad, OSChina. OSChina has open source library and code sharing functions with about 80 000 codes of high quality. We can get the help of the Internet groups from some active open source communities, and share the practical achievements of the previous students. We can also set some tasks and demands for students' reading and maintaining open source software, such as annotating code, analyzing code, testing code, maintaining code, and so on.

● Some students' imaginations and creativities should be fully encouraged and stimulated, so that students can energetically learn and develop some valuable and promising software projects or applications. In the process, some practical teaching support platforms on the Internet could be used, such as Trustie, to realize resource sharing, collaborative development, project hosting, exchange discussion, and tracking evaluation.Moreover, other open source software and retrieval platform OSSEAN could be also used. These project practice can really improve students' practical ability of software engineering.

4 Conclusion

In this paper, we have introduced the software engineering standard for VSEs, and presented some software engineering reforms, practice and operations in Hunan University. Some innovations and experiences of software engineering education were showed,including academic strategy, curriculum system, ability training, teaching methods, project practice, and so on.

At present, software engineering education needs further explorations and innovations, specially,under the background of Chinese "double first-class"new situation and new engineering subject. How to reform the practice teaching of software engineering in combination with the requirements of the new engineering subject, is still one question worthy of thinking.

ISO/IEC 29110 offers a customized set of standards and guidelines for VSEs to guide their systems and software life-cycle activities, and thus improve their competitiveness in quality, cost and schedule. The standard could be learned and studied on software engineering education for VSEs.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China Hunan Province (No.2016JJ2057); the Science Foundation of China Hunan Provincial Education Department (No. 15C0546).