Can We Influence Students? Attitudes About Inspections? Can We Measure a Change in Attitude?

As the software industry matures, new development technologies are invented and some of these technologies transition into best practices. Our role as university educators is to teach these best practices and change attitudes so that our students graduate as software engineers who believe in the use of these methodologies. One question that all software engineering educators have is ‘Can we measure whether our courses change attitudes about the use of these methodologies?’ In this small case study, conventional techniques in psychology for attitude measurement are used to construct scales for measuring software engineering students’ attitudes toward the code inspection process. The scales were applied in a pre-pilot survey, a pilot survey, a test survey, and then again in a larger test situation. Our test results suggest that our students improved their intellectual acceptance of code inspections after viewing an inspection video. Students emotionally accepted inspection only after practice. Our work shows that this line of research has the potential to help assess the impact of software engineering teaching methods and materials.