With the proliferation of embedded ubiquitous systems in all aspects of human life, the development of embedded systems has been facing more and more challenges (e.g., quality, time to market, etc.). Meanwhile, lots of software processes have been reported to be applied in Embedded Systems Development (ESD) with various advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, it’s important to portrait a big picture of the state-of-the-practice of the adoption of the software processes in ESD, which may benefit both practitioners and researchers in this area. This paper presents our investigation on this topic using systematic review that is intended to: 1) identify typical challenging factors and how software processes and practices address them; and 2) discover improvement opportunities from both academic and industrial perspectives.

Code review is believed to be an effective technique to remove defects in early development stage and improve software quality. Therefore, it is regarded as one of the basic skills of qualified software engineers. Consequently, most curricula for SE students incorporated knowledge about code review in different courses. However, how to teach students to conduct efficient code review remains challenging. Many reports claimed that using checklist during code review could increase review efficiency (percentage of defects removed in code review). Nevertheless, we found a quite different result through analyzing the data collected from a PSP course took by freshmen. Results indicate that checklist contributes more to helping beginners conduct code review than to improving review efficiency. This finding implies that educators need to properly recognize the role of checklist in code review for students and explore more approaches to help students master skills to conduct efficient code reviews.

Handling large-sized classes and maintaining students' involvement are two of the major challenges in Personal Software Process (PSP) education in universities. In order to tackle these two challenges, we adapted and incorporated some typical practices of Pair Programming (PP) into the PSP class at summer school in Software Institute of Nanjing University in 2010, and received positive results, such as higher students' involvement and conformity of process discipline, as well as (half) workload reduction in evaluating assignments. However, the experiment did not confirm the improved performance of the paired students as expected. Based on the experience and feedbacks, we improved this approach in our PSP course in 2011. Accordingly, by analyzing the previous experiment results, we redesigned the experiment with a number of improvements, such as lab environment, evaluation methods and student selection, to further investigate the effects of this approach in PSP education, in particular students' performance. We also introduced several new metrics to enable the comparison analysis of the data collected from both paired students and solo students. The new experiment confirms the value of pairing practices in PSP education. The results show that in PSP class, compared to solo students, paired students can achieve better performance in terms of program quality and exam scores.