Integrating Software Engineering Key Practices into an OOP Massive In-Classroom Course: an Experience Report

Programming and software engineering courses in computer science curricula typically focus on both providing theoretical knowledge of programming languages and best-practices, and developing practical development skills. In a massive course --- several hundred students --- the teachers are not able to adequately attend to the practical part, therefore process automation and incentives to students must be used to drive the students in the right direction. Our goals was to design an automated programming assignment infrastructure capable of supporting massive courses. The infrastructure should encourage students to apply the key software engineering (SE) practices --- automated testing, configuration management, and Integrated Development Environment (IDE) --- and acquire the basic skills for using the corresponding tools. We selected a few widely adopted development tools used to support the key software engineering practices and mapped them to the basic activities in our exam assignment management process. This experience report describes the results from the past academic year. The infrastructure we built has been used for a full academic year and supported four exam sessions for a total of over a thousand students. The satisfaction level reported by the students is generally high.