FINDING THE BEST APPROACH TO TEACH SOFTWARE ENGINEERING IN COMPUTER STUDIES: REVIEWING TWENTY YEARS OF EXPERIENCE

The "Software Engineering" subject has been taught in computer science studies at the Universitat Jaume I since 1992, just one year after the university started to run. The author O. Coltell started to teach it in 1994 and he has been teaching Software Engineering every academic year until now along with four courses of two different pre-Bologna studies: Computer Science Degree and Information Systems Technical Degree; all of them in two consecutive old curricula: 1991 and 2001. In order to efficiently learn Software Engineering it is required to have some experience in the development of software systems. At least, some experience in computer programming and business organization is required. This has been one of main challenges for teachers because our students, when they started the corresponding Software Engineering course, had no (or scarce) experience in both activities. Taking in account the discipline challenges, the technological evolution and the student's skills, the author has applied several educational, motivational and social approaches to teach Software Engineering along these years. Therefore, this work reviews these approaches, and describes the obtained results in terms of student' progress and evaluation, and includes some conclusions about how to design and elaborate mixed combination of techniques.