Towards Data-driven Software Engineering Skills Assessment

Today’s software engineers often work in teams to develop complex software systems. Therefore, successful software engineering in practice not only require team members to possess sound programming skills such as analysis, design, coding, and testing, but also soft skills such as communication, collaboration, and self-management, etc. However, existing examination based assessments are often inadequate for quantifying students’ soft skill development. In this paper, we explore alternative ways for assessing software engineering students’ skills through a datadriven approach. Leveraging our proposed HASE online agile project management (APM) tool, we conducted a study involving 21 Scrum teams consisting of over 100 undergraduate software engineering students in multi-week coursework projects in 2014. During this study, students performed close to 170,000 software engineering activities logged by HASE. By analyzing the collected activity trajectory dataset, we demonstrate the potential for this new research direction to enable software engineering educators to have a quantifiable way of understanding their students’ skill development, and take a proactive approach in helping them improve their programming and soft skills.