Seleção de projetos de código aberto para educação em engenharia de software.

Abstract

Context: Free/open source software (FLOSS) has been used in Software Engineering Education (SEE) as a viable strategy to address the need for developing students’ tech- nical and non-technical skills and to prepare them to face the increasingly challenging software industry. Some studies report that the pedagogical use of FLOSS projects has benefits but also challenges that may hinder their e↵ective adoption in SEE. One of such challenges is the selection of FLOSS projects. In general, the teacher must search for one or more projects for pedagogical use in the course, manually or with the support of di↵erent tools (not necessarily designed for use in Education). Some criteria for selecting a FLOSS project for pedagogical use are: project size, number of tests, programming language, community size and their practices. Problem: The selection of FLOSS projects for pedagogical use in SEE requires e↵ort and experience, and there are few tools that support such complex task while providing clear and well-defined selection criteria to be used by the teacher. Thus, the burden of selecting FLOSS projects can hinder their use and adoption in the context of SEE. Objective: This research aimed to investigate the usefulness of an automated approach to support the teacher in the selection of FLOSS projects, guided by criteria that take into account their socio-technical aspects, for pedagogical use in SEE higher education. Reasearch Method: A literature review provided a set of criteria that have been used for the selection of FLOSS projects. Then, a subset of such selection criteria was docu- mented, operationalized and implemented in an open source tool called FlossSearch.Edu. The tool was evaluated by means of two empirical studies. In the first study, undergra- duate students used FlossSearch.Edu, in the context of a software engineering 1-semester course, to select FLOSS projects based on criteria defined by the teacher, and then eva- luated the use of the tool through a survey with questions based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). In the second study, teachers from di↵erent Brazilian higher education institutions, already familiar with the pedagogical use of FLOSS projects, used FlossSearch.Edu in an individual session, guided by predefined scenarios, while reporting their impressions out loud (“Think Aloud”protocol). At the end of the recorded sessions, they evaluated the use of the tool by means of a TAM questionnaire. Findings: Most of the students who used FlossSearch.Edu in the classroom and teachers who participated in the second study, evaluated the tool as useful and easy to use, and intended to use it in the future. They provided suggestions for improvement that should guide tool evolution and future studies.