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The Essence Theory of Software Engineering – Large-Scale Classroom Experiences from 450+ Software Engineering BSc Students

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Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11271))

Abstract

Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practical project work. In this paper, we study Essence in an educational setting to evaluate its usefulness for software engineering students while also investigating barriers to its adoption in this context. To this end, we observe 102 student teams utilize Essence in practical software engineering projects during a semester long, project-based course.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    semat.org.

  2. 2.

    ScrumBut refers to using Scrum while omitting some parts of it, “We use Scrum, but…” (refer to: https://www.scrum.org/resources/what-scrumbut).

  3. 3.

    https://practicelibrary.ivarjacobson.com/start.

  4. 4.

    A book showcasing the results of the projects can be found on Figshare: https://figshare.com/articles/100_Open_Sourced_Software_Robots_for_Tomorrow_s_Education_Revolutionizing_the_University_Learning_Experience_with_Bot_Technologies/5597983.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Jyväskylä, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Kai-Kristian Kemell, Juhani Risku & Pekka Abrahamsson

  2. University of Southeast Norway, Notodden, Norway

    Anh Nguyen-Duc

  3. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, 39100, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Xiaofeng Wang

Authors
  1. Kai-Kristian Kemell
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  2. Anh Nguyen-Duc
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  3. Xiaofeng Wang
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  4. Juhani Risku
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  5. Pekka Abrahamsson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kai-Kristian Kemell .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität Clausthal, Goslar, Germany

    Marco Kuhrmann

  2. Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Kurt Schneider

  3. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Dietmar Pfahl

  4. Okayama Prefectural University, Okayama, Japan

    Sousuke Amasaki

  5. QAware GmbH, Munich, Germany

    Marcus Ciolkowski

  6. Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Regina Hebig

  7. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Paolo Tell

  8. Leibniz University Hannover, Hannover, Germany

    Jil Klünder

  9. Clausthal University of Technology, Goslar, Germany

    Steffen Küpper

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Kemell, KK., Nguyen-Duc, A., Wang, X., Risku, J., Abrahamsson, P. (2018). The Essence Theory of Software Engineering – Large-Scale Classroom Experiences from 450+ Software Engineering BSc Students. In: Kuhrmann, M., et al. Product-Focused Software Process Improvement. PROFES 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11271. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03673-7_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03672-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03673-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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