A Software Lab with On-demand Support

Abstract

Software lab courses are in a paradoxical situation: teaching and experiencing software engineering processes requires large and complex projects as well as various tools but target students with extremely diverse prior knowledge, thus regularly overwhelming the more inexperienced ones. In this paper, we present a software lab course design: we expose teams of students to the full complexity of software development projects while simultaneously employing various systems that identify issues in teamwork or project progress and allow lecturers to provide on-demand support throughout all stages. The success of the course is shown by questionnaire data from the last ten years.