Enhancing software engineering education through open source projects: four years of students' perspectives

摘要

It is often observed that a difficult aspect of teaching software engineering is getting students to appreciate the difference in scale between software written as exercises in programming classes and software that professional developers produce. Many of the rules of good practice only make sense in the context of software on a scale much greater than students will have experienced, so when introduced in a classroom setting, they are too easily dismissed as complex and unnecessary. This leads to suggestions that students should be exposed to real commercial software as part of their education. The rise of open-source software gives an alternative that may be more easily arranged: students are asked to volunteer as contributors to free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) projects (the FLOSS term avoids taking sides in an ongoing debate on terminology). This paper discusses the experience of using this approach in one particular module.