We replicate a study and extend previous research that examined graduating students' achievement and understanding when asked to "produce a design". In this paper, we examine software designs produced by students at an earlier stage in their undergraduate studies -- the midpoint. We were looking for characteristics of the development of skill at software design as students progress through the curriculum. These students did about as well as graduating students from the same institution in terms of the quality of their software designs, although they failed to produce as many complete designs. In addition to attributes uncovered in previous research, a new design attribute was noticed -- meaningful links between static components. We raise the question of where GUI designs fit in the area of software design.

In this paper we revisit previous research to elaborate on the question: "Can graduating students design software systems?" The work concluded that the answer was "not really". We wished to determine if this was true currently at our institution and also to look at whether students were able to design software in groups, and evaluate others' designs. In summary, it appears that our students, just as in the original experiment, struggle with doing design, even in a group situation. The representation of behavioral design was particularly lacking. That said, students were able to recognize weaknesses when evaluating other group designs. Based on our findings, we provide several pedagogic recommendations.

Extreme programming (XP) is an agile methodology claimed to promote the rapid development of software systems, enabling the accommodation of changing customer requirements during the project lifecycle without excessive cost penalties. The mechanisms used to achieve this require the software development team to maintain accurate tacit knowledge through extensive face-to-face communication and peer learning. This characteristic of XP, the authors argue, makes it a suitable tool in the teaching of new technologies to software engineering students. This is borne out by feedback from a group of fourth-year Master of Engineering (MEng) software engineering undergraduate students who undertook an XP-based project as part of their course. Furthermore, the authors argue that the methodology is best taught in its full form through group project work. This is most effective when undertaken in the latter years of a computer science or software engineering course, after the students have been exposed to more traditional, plan-based methodologies.

Presents an integrated approach (practices) to object-oriented distributed application development that covers all phases of software development: requirements capture, analysis, design (structural and behavioural), simulation and targeting to CORBA-based distributed processing environments. We focus on a code generation strategy that addresses and supports all phases of the practices. We highlight code generation objectives including support for multiple paths through the practices, reuse of existing tool-sets and support for traceability. We describe one path in more detail and present an example of design-OMT-to-SDL translation based on labelling in OMT. We describe two development environments used in the project and analyse them with respect to their support for our code generation objectives. Our tool adaptation work is addressing identified weaknesses. This includes an SDL-to-Java/CORBA code generator, the generation of CORBA-to-SDL-mapping C++ wrappers for C code generated by existing tools and the use of CORBA to integrate development tools and support traceability.

As more software support tools become available, the construct ion of support environments by integration of ezisting tools becomes more desirable.The European project "Broadband Object-Oriented Service Technology" investigated the adaptation and integration of existing software tools to support telecommunications service creation.The investigation covered different approaches to adapting and integrating existing tools to form a service creation environment.The earliest environment encapsulated a wide range of these tools within an environment called EAST, supplied by the Soci6t6 Frangaise de G&ie Logiciel.While EAST provided a number of benefits, the users of the environment expressed a desire for small special-purpose toolkits which were created by the tool-to-tool integration of specific tools.These toolkits were used on their own, and were also encapsulated within EAST.With the advent of Tel, a language which facilitates tool programmability, it became possible to create programmable "capsules", and these were used for later encapsulations within EAST.Tcl also made it possible to create more flexible toolkits by direct toolto-tool integration.Experiences with all these different approaches are presented here, and future directions are discussed.q