SEET Session

Graduating computer science and software engineering students do not always possess the necessary skills, abilities, or knowledge when beginning their careers in the software industry. The lack of these skills and abilities can limit the productivity of newly hired, recent graduates, or even prevent them from gaining employment. This paper presents the results of an empirical study where twenty-three managers and hiring personnel from various software companies in the United States and Europe were interviewed. Participants were asked about areas where recent graduates frequently struggled when beginning employment at their companies and which skill deficiencies might prevent a recent graduate from being hired. The results of this study indicate that recent graduates struggle with using configuration management systems (and other software tools), effectively communicating with co-workers and customers, producing unit tests for their code, and other skills or abilities. The results also indicate that a lack of project experience and problem solving abilities are the most commonly cited issues preventing students from gaining employment. This research is intended to assist educators in identifying areas where students may not measure up the expectations of industry companies and in improving the curriculum at their universities to better prepare them for their future careers.

A well-trained software engineering workforce is a key to success in a highly competitive environment. Changing tools and technologies, along with a rapidly changing development environment, make it incumbent on organizations to invest in training. In this paper, we describe our experience in deploying an online training program in a globally distributed organization. We write about the reasons behind ABB’s Software Development Improvement Program (SDIP), the requirements we established upfront, the people, processes and technologies we used, the promotion of SDIP, and metrics for measuring success. Finally, we share and describe results and lessons learned that could be applied to many organizations with similar issues. The goal of this paper is to provide a set of replicable best practices for initiating a software training program in a multi-national organization. The first SDIP online course was offered in June 2012. Since then, we have had more than 10,000 enrollments from employees in 54 countries. Today, our training library contains 89 e-learning, 17 webinar, video and virtual lab courses, and we have delivered more than 180 hosted webinars. Following each class, we ask students to evaluate the class. Ninety-eight percent are satisfied with the classes.

We examine how students work in scenario-based and object- oriented programming (OOP) languages, and qualitatively analyze the use of abstraction through the prism of the dif- ferences between the paradigms. The findings indicate that when working in a scenario-based language, programmers think on a higher level of abstraction than when working with OOP languages. This is explained by other findings, which suggest how the declarative, incremental nature of scenario-based programming facilitates separation of con- cerns, and how it supports a kind of programming that al- lows programmers to work with a less detailed mental model of the system they develop. The findings shed light on how declarative approaches can reduce the cognitive load involved in programming, and how scenario-based programming might solve some of the difficulties involved in the use of declarative languages. This is applicable to the design of learning materials, and to the design of programming languages and tools.

We have run the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects (UCOSP) program for ten terms over the past six years providing over 400 Canadian students from more than 30 schools the opportunity to be members of distributed software teams. UCOSP aims to provide students with real development experience enabling them to integrate lessons they have learned in the classroom with practical development experience while developing their technical communication skills. The UCOSP program has evolved over time as we have learned how to effectively manage a diverse set of students working on a large number of different projects. The goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the roles of the various stakeholders for distributed software engineering projects and the various lessons we have learned to make UCOSP an effective and positive learning experience.