Scalable Team-Based Software Engineering Education via Automated Systems

Abstract

Team projects are essential in modern software engineering education. Students collaboratively build a piece of software that addresses practical issues, through which they practice both technical skills and soft skills, in a setting that resembles the real working environment. However, team projects are complex. Previous studies have explored various design spaces, such as team formation [1], project selection [2], team coaching [3], and student evaluation [4]; while others have reported experience regarding the design, organization, teaching, and evolution of a project-based software engineering curriculum [5][6][7][8]. The complexity of team projects explains why we rarely see large-scale software engineering courses with a team project. In this paper, we try to address the scalability issue of software engineering projects and lay out our blueprint for enabling the learning of software engineering with a team project via MOOCs.