Open Source Software: A Source of Possibilities for Software Engineering Education and Empirical Software Engineering

Open source projects are an interesting source for software engineering education and research. By participating in open source projects students can improve their programming and design capabilities. By reflecting on own participation by means of an established research method and plan, master's students can in addition contribute to increase knowledge concerning research questions. In this work we report on a concrete study in the context of the Net- beans open source project. The research method used is a modification of action research.

1 Introduction

Open source software (OSS) has shaped software engineering education programs over the past decade [9]. OSS development poses serious challenges not only to the commercial software industry, but also to academic institutions that educate software engineers. Motivated by their passion for programming, some of our students love participating in OSS projects; some have even been participating in OSS projects for years.