Using Groupware to Learn Software Process Improvement

1 Torgeir Dingsøyr, Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway. [email protected] Abstract  This paper describes the learning goals and organisation of a course in software process improvement given at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and what we see as the learning improvement after introducing a groupware tool for distributing course information and collecting hand-ins from the students. Software process improvement is a subfield of software engineering in Computer Science that aims to improve the quality of software products. This involves examining the way software is produced, the work process. A major challenge when giving a course in software process improvement is to learn students who are used to taking academic courses about problems that you normally find in an industrial setting. In order to encourage more discussion on the topics in the course, we started to use a groupware tool for handling exercises two years ago. This tool is accesses through the World Wide Web, and students have access to all course-related information. They are also told to publish their hand-ins here, where everyone has the possibility to see them. The comments given by teaching assistants is also shown here. During the last semester, we measured the usage of the groupware system, and find several interesting patterns: The most accessed documents are related to course organization and curriculum. Slides from class and exercises are downloaded a lot less. And it seems that the students read each other's exercises.