Who's Teaching Best Practices? A review of Canadian CS/SE curriculums and how to improve integration of agile/best practices.
Abstract:
This session is inspired by a short series of blog posts I wrote last year exploring the extent of best practices instruction within Canadian Computer Science and Software Engineering departments. We will be reviewing my findings, including a discussion on exemplary and not so exemplary schools and their approach to integrating concepts such as agile/lean/iterative software development, TDD, refactoring, design patterns and agile requirements gathering into their course offerings. We will conclude with a workshop where attendees will collaborate to develop their own university level best practice curriculums.
The session will break down into the following segments:
Part I: Review of the 2007 Canadian CS/SE Best Practices Analysis (30 mins approx)
a) Introduction of topic and summary of thesis
b) Exploration of criteria and process (very brief)
c) High-level summary of findings
d) Quick overview of the schools to avoid for CS/SE, ie. “worst practitioners”
e) Criticisms of the Investigation: CS/SE Pursefight
Part II: Creating the Ideal CS/SE Best Practices Curriculum
a) Building on the results covered in Part I, participants will be broken down into several teams who will have approx 30 minutes to develop a set of best practices curriculum that could be taught at a university level, which will be reported on at the end of the session. They will need to follow a basic set of criteria:
- List the theme for the delivery of the content: Is this only for 4th year students or is it delivered continually throughout the program (ie. years 1-4) ?
- List the topics to be covered in the courses - here, the teams can refer to the schools I’ve highlighted for examples on how they approached course breakdowns;
b) Reporting Curriculums: Leads for each team will take the podium to report their suggestions for best practices courses, what years that they would be taught (1-4) and if they would apply universally to CS and SE schools as well as their rationale for the decisions. Further, they will be asked about mechanisms they could use to monitor the progress of best practices delivery. (15 mins approx)
c) Big “IF” here: I may be able to reach an Adjunct prof at UofT for his input at this point on the courses created by the teams and for insights on how U of T implemented their programs. (15 mins approx)
Slides will be minimal, opting for the Steve Jobs’ school of presentations. For the reporting portion, I’m thinking of just having Notepad2 open and projecting to display results - these could then be collated and posted to the conference site on wrap-up.