Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

• Published in: 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE) pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Matthies, Christoph, Teusner, Ralf, Hesse, Guenter
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2018
• Subjects: capstone course; Data mining; development artifacts; Educational Data Mining; Electronic learning; Industries; Kanban; Scrum; Scrum (Software development); Software; Software engineering
• ISSN: 2377-634X
• DOI: 10.1109/FIE.2018.8659205

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university undergraduate software development course teaching agile development methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However, surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals. Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows between Kanban and Scrum usage.