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Practicing Soft Skills in Software Engineering: A Project-Based Didactical Approach

Practicing Soft Skills in Software Engineering: A Project-Based Didactical Approach
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Author(s): Yvonne Sedelmaier (Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany)and Dieter Landes (Coburg University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany)
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 19
Source title: Overcoming Challenges in Software Engineering Education: Delivering Non-Technical Knowledge and Skills
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Liguo Yu (Indiana University South Bend, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-5800-4.ch009

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Abstract

Software Engineering requires a specific profile of technical expertise combined with context-sensitive soft skills. Therefore, university education in software engineering should foster both technical knowledge and soft skills. Students should be enabled to cope with complex situations in real life by applying and combining their theoretical knowledge with team and communication competencies. In this chapter, the authors report findings from a software engineering project course. They argue that project work is a suitable approach to foster soft skills. To that end, the authors provide justification from a pedagogical point of view, setting project-based learning into relation to action-orientated didactics. As teaching goals, they focus on experiencing a complete development project from end to end, following a software process model that needs to be adapted to the specific situation, self-determined planning and acting, including the organization of the project, teamwork and team communication, and self-reflection on individual roles and contributions, and on the performance of the project team as a whole. In order to achieve these goals, the authors form teams of bachelor students, which are headed by one master student each. It turned out that a clear separation of roles is inevitable within the team, but also with respect to instructors. Self-reflection processes concerning the team roles and the individual competencies are explicitly stimulated and cumulate in individual self-reports and post-mortem analysis sessions. The authors share findings of how well the approaches have worked and outline some ideas to improve things.

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