Supporting Mobile Development Project-Based learning by Software Project and Product Measures

Project-based learning is a kind of learning activity which has great educative effect, but which presents also several issues. In particular, if we consider an university course that requires the design and the implementation of a software project, may be difficult to estimate the number of hours that a team of students has to take to accomplish that project. There is the risk to underestimate the project (too difficult) or to overestimate it (too easy) with respect to the other projects of the same course and the amount of foreseen work hours. In this paper, we present the experience we gained in the adoption of Software Project and Product Measures for addressing the project size of projects performed during a Mobile Application Development course for Computer Science students at the University of Salerno. The course foresaw a project work conducted by students organized in teams. The goal of the project work was to design and develop an Android-based application with back-end for smart devices. Software estimation project measures are applied to some metrics extracted in the requirement analysis phase to get an estimation of the effort in terms of man/hours and consequently to adjust the project size by adding/reducing requirements. The metrics extracted from the projects of academic year 2013/14 have been used in the successive year for estimating the project effort and intervene on the project size variables.