The Adoption of Open Source Projects in Engineering Education: A Real Software Development Experience
Debora Nascimento, Christina F. G. Chavez, Roberto A. Bittencourt · 2018
This research to practice full paper investigates software engineering students' perceptions of their contact with open source projects as a real-world experience. Working with open source projects (OSPs) has been shown as an interesting option in software engineering courses to bringing students closer to more realistic environments. However, when instructors use this approach, it is not clear whether students perceive the OSP as a real industrial software project, or whether they perceive the tasks they perform over OSPs as typical or close to industrial software project activities. The goal of this work was to identify students' perceptions of their interaction with an open source project as a real world experience. To do so, we performed three mixed-methods case studies with three different undergraduate classes. Each class had a different focus: i) software maintenance and evolution, ii) software testing, and iii) reverse engineering of software requirements. Results show that students perceived features that make OSPs close to industrial projects, realized that their OSP tasks are close to the ones in industrial projects, and also faced difficulties typical of working with real world software. Moreover, students forged a view of the skills needed for their future professional success. We conclude that students realized that performing tasks in OSPs was a real world experience they took part, contributing to their background both for the competencies they acquired and the difficulties they had to overcome.