Tasks in Software Engineering Education: The Case of a Human Aspects of Software Engineering Course

Abstract

The field of software engineering is multifaceted. Accordingly, students must be educated to cope with different kinds of tasks and questions. This chapter describes a collection of tasks that aim at improving students’ skills in different ways. We illustrate our ideas by describing a course about human aspects of software engineering. The course objective is to increase learners’ awareness with respect to problems, dilemmas, ethical questions, and other human-related situations that students may face in the software engineering world. We attempt to achieve this goal by posing different kinds of questions and tasks to the learners, which aim at enhancing their abstract thinking and expanding their analysis perspectives. The chapter is based on our experience teaching the course at Carnegie-Mellon University and at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.