This work in progress innovative practice paper describes a preliminary framework for fostering leadership skills in software engineering students. The software industry is an environment of uncertainty, volatility and constant change. This has shaped the industry components and actors, generating methodologies that are able to cope with market expectations and software development requirements. Among these, agile is the most adopted. Professionals that possess skills to work in these agile teams, often named “soft skills”, are challenging for universities to teach. From these skills, leadership, in particular, is a soft skill that has recently been studied by the software engineering education community but remains as an open research topic. A teaching methodology that demonstrated positive outcomes is active learning, as it centers the students in the process, enhances motivation and provides a collaborative approach for learning. In this context, this work aims at proposing a framework to train students to possess leadership skills using challenge based learning. To achieve this goal, we propose a preliminary framework to be used when teaching leadership skills to software engineering students in active learning environments. Our results provide indicatives that the framework could be effective at fostering shared leadership, with the proposed role rotation during the development cycle, but it also presents challenges in the process of generating guiding questions for learning as the process does not seem clear from the perspective of the experts.

Teaching software engineering is challenging as it is a field widely desired by the market, and it requires professionals with an increasing set of skills. There are gaps in this learning process perceived both by professionals from the academia and from the industry that need to be further investigated in order to find strategies to reconcile the expectations from both environments. In this sense, this study aims to investigate these gaps from the perspective of Information Technology (IT) team leaders. In order to do so, we chose a qualitative approach to absorb as much knowledge as possible from each interviewed leader by using a field study methodology. Among the results obtained, we identified the appropriate profile to become an IT leader, what IT leaders expect regarding the skills of IT novices, and how the academia and the industry could work together to build an environment that better prepares these professional, according to the view of the interviewed leaders.

Software development practices to enhance software quality and help teams better develop collaboratively have received attention by the academic community.Among these techniques is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), a development approach which proposes software to be developed focusing primarily on its expected behavior.Teaching-wise, introducing BDD on software engineering classes and/or training courses for software developers has become important.In this context, this study presents a body of knowledge on the impacts of teaching BDD in active learning environments (ALE).To achieve this, we have triangulated data from four data sources: (i) a systematic literature review; (ii) an expert panel with active-learning experts, (iii) a survey with participants in a software development course which teaches through active learning, and (iv) a case study on the effects of teaching and using BDD in an ALE.This study results are (i) the-state-of-the-art literature on this topic, (ii) an assessment of benefits and challenges of BDD in ALEs, and (iii) a set of best practices when teaching BDD in ALEs.We concluded that BDD has more positive than negative outcomes and we present a body of knowledge regarding BDD in ALEs.

Training students on mobile application development inherits the challenges of teaching software engineering where the target computer is a device that has a large number of features accessible by software.Furthermore, the most related experience in teaching students reveals difficulties in developing software engineering competencies.In this paper we present results from an iOS course held in a smart learning environment that adopted the Challenge Based Learning framework as the teaching methodology.Our results indicate that combining an active methodology along with an engaging environment can foster and improve software development learning.