Context: This full research paper presents an experience-based course designed around a semester-long external Innovation Bootcamp. Objective: We evaluated the impact of the Innovation Bootcamp on students' learning and startup formations, measuring how it affected students' perceived challenges related to technical skills, soft skills, project management, and startup-formation mindsets. Method: We conducted design-based research comprising questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups with students and stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp. In total, 44 students answered the questionnaires conducted before and after the Innovation Bootcamps in both academic years. In the second year, 12 students answered the Berkeley Innovation Index questionnaire to measure their innovation mindsets. We also conducted four individual interviews (student cohort 1), four focus group interviews (student cohort 2), and six individual interviews with stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp in both years. Results: We found that perceptions of challenges regarding soft and project-management skills declined, while perceptions of challenges regarding technical skills did not vary during the course. Students exhibited increased motivation to engage in startup formation following close collaboration with external stakeholders only after developing their first minimum viable product. Contribution: The study's outcomes contribute to validating a new team-centered model that facilitates startup formation in experience-based courses. We also intend to help educators and researchers adopt Innovation Bootcamps in experience-based, software engineering-focused courses.

Context: Customer-driven courses have been a classic approach in teaching software engineering for over four decades at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The main goal of these courses is close collaboration between students and customers. However, in this scope of work, the intent was to evaluate students' perception of skills acquisition, startup formation mindset, and the introduction of external activities. Objectives: Several aspects were investigated, which include how collaboration with external customers affects student skills in a customer-driven course, how collaboration with external customers affects students' motivation in startup formation, and how students perceive the introduction of an external Innovation Bootcamp activity at the start of the course. Method: Twelve semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with 86 students. Furthermore, an inductive thematic analysis was performed, which utilized open coding of the interview transcripts. Results: Students reflected an improvement in technical, soft, and project management skills. It was found that many of the customers' projects were not eligible for becoming startups due to the nature of the project niche scope closely related to the customer needs. Motivations in startup formation rely heavily on individual students' mindsets, and many of the teams had a weak perception about startup formation within the existing course context. The overall observation from the focus group interviews was that introducing external activities such as Innovation Bootcamp could assist in the process of startup formation and elevate the projects' relevance and quality. Contribution: The study's findings contribute to the course's future improvement while introducing external activity. The outcome could promote student innovation and active participation in customer project proposals and end-product features. Educators and researchers can benefit from the findings of our study in regard to making future updates to their customer-driven courses. There is also potential to increase practitioners' awareness of positive student input in their project proposals.

Context: Approaches to teaching software engineering are becoming more interdisciplinary and team-centered, similar to a startup practice context. Therefore, educators must have an adequate framework for supporting software engineering teaching through startup practice. However, only a meager set of existing frameworks introduce startup practice to teach software engineering. Aim: Our study aims to develop and validate a framework for teaching software engineering through startup practice in higher education. Method: We developed a framework for introducing startup practices in software engineering education. We first identified the framework domains (course teaching and design perspectives, course theoretical lens, and course design and interaction practices) based on a previous literature review pinpointing lean software startups as part of software engineering education research. We further identified dimensions for each domain based on investigations in both our software engineering experience-based course and growth phase startup context. Finally, we validated the framework using a Delphi method. Results: We found that the perception of the framework dimensions was positive among the experts who, on average, rated 14 out of 19 dimensions as highly important (approximately 75%) and the rest (25%) as of average importance. From the current results, we are able to deduce that our proposed framework can provide realistic learning expectations for SE students but also for other disciplines that can relate to software engineering. Contribution: The study's outcomes contribute to developing and validating a framework for teaching software engineering through startup practice in higher education. Our framework lays a foundation for educators and researchers by successfully combining experience-based software engineering courses with lean software startup industry practices. Furthermore, our framework contributes to students acquiring adequate professional skills to address societal challenges with a mindset focused on increased innovation and startup formation.

Software has become ubiquitous in every corner of modern societies. During the last five decades, software engineering has also changed significantly to advance the development of various types and scales of software products. In this context, Software Engineering Education plays an important role in keeping students updated with software technologies, processes, and practices that are popular in industries. We investigate from literature the extent Software Engineering Education addresses major Software Engineering Trends in the academic setting. We conducted a systematic mapping study about teaching major Software Engineering Trends in project courses. We classified 126 papers based on their investigated Software Engineering Trends, specifically Software Engineering processes and practices, teaching approaches, and the evolution of Software Engineering Trends over time. We reveal that Agile Software Development is the major trend. The other Trends, i.e., Software Implementation, Usability and Value, Global Software Engineering, and Lean Software Startup, are relatively small in the academic setting, but continuously growing in the last five years. System of Systems is the least investigated among all Trends. The study points out the possible gaps between Software Industry and Education, which implies actionable insights for researchers, educators, and practitioners.

Context: Software startups are software-intensive early-stage companies with high growth rates. We notice little evidence in the literature concerning engineering practices when startups transition to the growth phase. Aim: Our goal is to evaluate how software startups embrace software engineering practices. Methodology: We conduct a survey guided by semi-structured interviews as an initial step, to be followed by field questionnaires as part of a future exploratory study. We use open coding to identify patterns leading to themes we use to state our hypotheses. To identify our samples, we use purposive sampling. Results: Specifically, we analyze seven startup cases during the first qualitative phase. We obtain five anti-patterns (no-documentation, no-agile, no-code intellectual property protection, cowboy programming, no-automated testing) and corresponding patterns (readable code, ad-hoc project management, private code repositories, paired and individual programming, ad-hoc testing) in adopting software engineering practices. We state 10 corresponding hypotheses we intend to corroborate by surveying a more significant number of software startups. Contribution: This study, throughout its recommendations, provides an initial road map for software startups in the growth phase, allowing future researchers and practitioners to make educated recommendations.

We added a Bootcamp external activity to our experiential-based course for first-year master students of Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Students engaged with realistic challenges from stakeholders while participating in the Bootcamp. We aimed to evaluate this year’s student motivation in startup formation. We followed a mixed-methods approach combining data from a questionnaire and interviews. From the questionnaire, we found that the motivations regarding dimensions, such as startup formation increases, and the involvement of existing team members slightly decreased after Bootcamp. The interviews show that involving others–-not only the existing team members–-and having better funding opportunities are deemed crucial in future startup formations. The involvement in the startup formation of the existing stakeholders is still at a marginal level. The overall outcomes of the study help educators and researchers make educated decisions in relation to introducing startup formation within intensive software engineering experiential-based courses.

Context: This full research paper presents an experience-based course designed around a semester-long external Innovation Bootcamp activity. Objective: We sought to evaluate the impact of Innovation Bootcamp on students' learning and startup formation. To this end, we measured how the Innovation Bootcamp affected students' perceived challenges related to technical, soft project management skills and the startup formation mindset. Method: We conducted a cohort study comprising questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups with both students and stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp. In total, 44 students participated in the questionnaires run before and after the Innovation Bootcamps during both academic years. Moreover, we conducted four individual interviews (student cohort 1), four focus group interviews (student cohort 2), and six individual interviews with different stakeholders participating in the Innovation Bootcamp during both years. Results: We find that perceptions of challenges regarding soft and project management skills drop, while perceptions regarding technical skills challenges do not vary during the course. Students exhibit increased motivation to engage in startup formation following close collaboration with external stakeholders only after developing their first minimum viable product. Contribution: The overall outcomes of the study contribute to validating a new course design model, which will help develop a course framework to help future educators, researchers, and practitioners adopt Innovation Bootcamp activities within a software engineering-focused experience-based course.

In the modern economy, software drives innovation and economic growth. Studies show how software increasingly influences all industry sectors. During the last five decades, software engineering has also changed significantly to advance the development of various types and scales of software products. In this context, Software Engineering Education plays an essential role in keeping students updated with software technologies, processes, and practices popular in industries. In this Ph.D. work, I want to answer the following research questions: (1) To what extent are SE Trends presented in SEE research? (2) What do we know about the Lean Startups paradigm? (3) What is the impact of Lean Startup practices to software engineering students and curriculum? I utilize (1) literature review and (2) Mixed-methods approaches (data and methods triangulation) in gathering empirical evidence. In the first phase of the research, I pinpoint the relevance of Lean Startup within the software engineering education throughout an extensive literature review. I gather empirical evidence on Lean Startup practices and their potential transfer in software engineering education during the second research phase. I demonstrate that Lean Startup is part of the emerging software engineering trends within software engineering education research. I identify the gap of growth phase Lean Startup research in present software paradigms. I demonstrate that students can acquire soft, hard, and project management skills in a more realistic context while introducing growth phase Lean Startup practices throughout external course activities. I expect that the present software engineering curricula can benefit from a model and framework, which I intend to propose, facilitating Lean Startup practice transfer within the software engineering curriculum.