Planned Software Reuse in Object-oriented Software Engineering Education

A major problem associated with the teaching of software development techniques in the context of Software Engineering is the diiculty of realistically simulating large scale industrial-strength project developments in an educational environment. This paper describes our plan for focussing on software reuse in software engineering education within Australian Universities. A joint project involving three Universities is under way and a proposal to fund further development has been submitted to the Australian National Teaching Development Grant scheme for 1995. This joint project aims to develop a repository of software modules using object-oriented techniques and a distribution mechanism. The resulting system will be housed at Monash University and retrieved through AARnet by the various universities. These modules will be struc-tured to facilitate a exible construction of realistic software projects from rst to nal year level. This project will provide a better quality student learning environment and an Australian wide teaching resource in this area. 1. Introduction This paper describes a project which focuses on teaching software engineering in the context of reuse. The major aim of the project is to provide a basis by which we can simulate real-scale problems within a teaching context. Current teaching methods make this diicult. We see reuse as the key to bringing realistic case studies into the class room. Furthermore reuse is more feasible within an object-oriented environment where software reuse will be based on libraries of available quality components. The project is being jointly undertaken The importance of developing software engineering courses based on real-world applications to address software maintenance, integration, quality and reuse issues have been addressed by Meyer (1993) and Pierce (1993). The planning and design phases of integrating object-oriented software engineering into the computer science curriculum by Tewari and Friedman (1992) was partially supported by National Science foundation grant #USE 9156079. Sindre et al., (1992) report on aspects of the ESPRIT-2 project #5327 REBOOT (Reuse by Object-oriented techniques) in their article on \Software reuse in an educational perspective". The ACM/IEEE-CS joint curriculum task force report on Computing curricula 1991 stresses the importance of students working in teams in laboratories on analysis, design and implementation of systems. The report sees theory, abstraction and design as three processes that would be covered in a Computing Science/Software Engineering Course since computing encompasses mathematical, scientiic and engineering disciplines. This paper is focussed upon the third process (design), dealing with engineering issues of developing quality solutions with …