Learning Software Engineering Principles Using Open Source Software

Traditional lectures espousing software engineering principles hardly engage students' attention due to the fact that students often view software engineering principles as mere academic concepts without a clear understanding of how they can be used in practice. Some of the issues that contribute to this perception include lack of experience in-writing and understanding large programs, and lack of opportunities for inspecting and maintaining code written by others. To address these issues, we have worked on a project whose overarching goal is to teach students a subset of basic software engineering principles using source code exploration as the primary mechanism. We attempted to espouse the following software engineering principles and concepts: role of coding conventions and coding style, programming by intention to develop readable and maintainable code, assessing code quality using software metrics, refactoring, and reverse engineering to recover design elements. Student teams have examined the following open source Java code bases: ImageJ, Apache Derby, Apache Lucene, Hibernate, and JUnit. We have used Eclipse IDE and relevant plug-ins in this project.