Learning Experiences and Analysis in Professional Software Development Subject

Software Engineering or professional software development (PSD) course is an important subject in Computing Science of higher education. It teaches the theory knowledge on software development life cycle (SDLC). The students will also be taught to use appropriate quality assurance techniques, continuous integration, continuous development, software version control, and appropriate configuration management techniques, etc. In the curriculum of the joint degree programme of University of Glasgow and Singapore Institute of Technology, the PSD course which teaches theory of SDLC is offered concurrently with another course named Team Projects that students work in groups for software companies on real software development projects. During the learning journey in the courses of PSD and Team Projects, students have undergone different thoughts and experiences. In this paper, analyses are conducted to provide views and opinions regarding the learning journey for both courses. Limitations of the current learning methods are discussed in this paper, together with the proposed ideas to boost the learning effectiveness of PSD and Team Projects to benefit the next student cohorts.