Process Improvement within an Educational Environment

Process improvement is difficult to teach as it requires a firm basis in terms of a welldefined process and systematic measurement. In our large-scale software development course we are teaching process improvement using an experience base. The main improvement objective of the course is to teach improvement in terms of improved effort predictability. This also forms the basis to teach process improvement in more general terms. This paper outlines our large-scale software development course and describes how an experience factory can be implemented incrementally in an educational environment. The experience factory provides the baseline and the experience data to enable us to evaluate if we have improved or not. A Personal Software Process (PSP) course has recently been launched at the department, and it will form another perspective on process improvement. Thus, together the courses provide a comprehensive view of process improvement in software engineering. It is our belief that process improvement must be practised and the combination of a course in large-scale software development, the PSP course and the experience base provide an excellent starting point to teach software process improvement.