Using Free/Libre/Open Source for Software Engineering Education (original) (raw)
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Abstract. Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) presents a strategy for developing software products that is substantially different from what is usually taught in Software Engineering courses. This paper discusses the benefits of using FLOSS in Software Engineering Education, proposes a list of topics that should be covered in FLOSS-based Software Engineering courses and briefly reports our experience at two Brazilian universities.
Utilizing Open Source Software in Teaching Practice- based Software Engineering Courses
2016 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2016
— Software engineering courses face the challenge of covering all the stages of analysis, development, maintenance, and support while addressing practical issues such as dealing with large codebase. Free and open source software (FOSS) and more specifically humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) have been used by many educators to bring many add-ons to computer science education such as innovation and motivation. In addition, FOSS/HFOSS could give a better understanding of real world projects to students. In this work, we are looking at some activities developed for teaching upper division undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses using open source software projects and analyze the impacts of using this approach on students.
Free and Open Source Software Development and Research: Opportunities for Software Engineering
Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities have produced a large amount of valuable software that is directly or indirectly used daily by any person with access to a computer. The field of Software Engineering studies processes, mechanisms, tools, and frameworks for the development of software artifacts. Historically, however, most of Software Engineering research and education does not benefit from the large and rich source of data and experimental testbeds offered by FLOSS projects and their hundreds of millions of lines of working code. In this paper, we discuss how Software Engineering research and education can greatly benefit from the wealth of information available in the FLOSS ecosystem. We then evaluate how FLOSS has been used, up to now, by papers published in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. Finally, we present an agenda for the future, proposing concrete ways to exploit the synergies between research and education in Software Engineering and FLOSS projects.
2007
Abstract Open source projects are an interesting source for software engineering education and research. By participating in open source projects students can improve their programming and design capabilities. By reflecting on own participation by means of an established research method and plan, master's students can in addition contribute to increase knowledge concerning research questions. In this work we report on a concrete study in the context of the Net-beans open source project.
An Educational Framework for Free and Open Source Software
2013
As the adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is rapidly increasing, some countries have been mandating the use of FOSS in all government sectors, while other countries are in the process of adopting FOSS strategies. In addition, many education institutions have been adopting FOSS and have a competitive advantage over other institutions. The reasons of adopting FOSS are vary from one county to another and from one institution to another. However the main drives to this strategy are total cost ownership, free to make copies and distribute to others without being worried of software legality, reliability, availability, performance and security issues. This research intended to develop the framework for adoption of FOSS in education institutions in Zanzibar to reduce cost and increase computing power to students.
Training Software Engineers Using Open-Source Software: The Professors' Perspective
2017 IEEE 30th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T)
Traditional Software Engineering (SE) courses often prioritize methodologies and concepts in small, controlled environments: naive projects used as a proof of concept instead of full-fledged real software systems. Although this strategy has clear benefits, it does not place enough care in training students to face complex, non-trivial legacy software projects. To bridge this gap, novel SE courses are leveraging the rich variety of open-source software (OSS) projects to illustrate how these methodologies and concepts are applied to existing, non-trivial software systems. To better understand the benefits, challenges, and opportunities of this transition, in this paper, we interview seven SE professors that changed their academic setting to aspire students to comprehend, maintain, and evolve OSS systems as part of their SE course. We found that there are different ways to make use of OSS projects in SE courses in terms of project choice, assessment, and learning goals. Moreover, we evidence clear benefits of this approach, including improving students' social and technical skills, and helping students enhancing their resume. Also, we observed that this strategy comes with costs: the activity demands effort and time from the professor and the barrier for one getting involved with and, therefore, placing a meaningful contribution, in an OSS community is often high. Index Terms-Open-source software; Teaching Software Engineering; Open-Source Contributions; • RQ1. What makes a good OSS project for training SE students?
Open Source Software: A Big Leap in the Computer Education
We examine the appearance of open source software in computer science education. We will undertake with a concise tutorial on open source software introduction, including a depiction of major popular open source licenses. Later we deliberate the use of open source software in education discipline. We Present some advantage of open source software in the field of education Finally, we focus on the use of open source software in computer science education.
Engaging Students in Open Source: Establishing FOSS Development at a University
Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2019
Open source is widely used for educational purposes in higher education around the world. While many educators use open source resources for teaching, there seems to be few contributions to such projects of students as part of their university courses. In this work we present our experience on establishing open source development from student contributors as part of their university curriculum. Since 2010 more than 300 students from Graz University of Technology have been involved in the presented Catrobat project and have gained knowledge about agile software development as well as several related domains, e.g., project management, marketing, or graphical design. In this paper we provide detailed insights into the project's organization and evaluate in a study how students feel in this setting. As we conclude, bringing open source to university courses is an effective practical approach based on social learning and provides benefits for students and researchers.
ECEASST Using Free/Libre Open Source Software Projects as E-learning Tools
2015
as learning environments in which heterogeneous communities get together to ex-change knowledge through discussion and put it into practice through actual contri-butions to software development, revision and testing. This has encouraged tertiary educators to attempt the inclusion of participation in FLOSS projects as part of the requirements of Software Engineering courses, and pilot studies have been con-ducted to test the effectiveness of such an attempt. This paper discusses two pilot studies with reference to several studies concerning the role of learning in FLOSS projects and shows how using FLOSS projects as E-learning tools has a potential to increase the quality of the software product.