Continuous software engineering is increasingly ingrained and widely adopted in development projects. These projects have extended their processes by utilizing software measurement tools with dashboards to monitor and understand development best practices, quality, and evolution. Exploring development perceptions and behaviors in software engineering education and training contexts is needed to better understand how tools could aid development processes. The goal is to explore students' perceptions and development behaviors in software engineering projects that continuously measure contributions. We conducted a case study, mainly focusing on agile software engineering and quality best practices, and gathered behaviors and perceptions through mining repositories and applying surveys. Our results show acceptance of continuous measurement, where most respondents agreed that it benefited their software development process. We found benefits in engineering and quality practices such as continuous integration and configuration management. Some of the perceived benefits related to agile practices did not always align with observed behaviors. Our results suggest that continuous measurement in software engineering education had mostly positive perceptions and outlooks on behaviors. These findings are encouraging for adopters of continuous measurement tools in education and training contexts.

Software visualization is a program comprehension technique that can support activities such as the analysis of the quality during the evolution of development. The empirical evaluation of software visualizations is necessary to provide evidence of perceptions and experiences of use, and the benefits provided during software analysis. Empirical data can help evidence the advantages and limitations of software visualizations, improving their acceptance in academia and industry. This study presents an analysis of the perceptions of 16 participants using a 3D city metaphor visualization to understand the structure of a web application and identify aspects related to development and quality best practices in a software engineering university course. For this, we studied the user experience through the UE Questionnaire (UEQ) and the ease of use, the perceived usefulness, and the intention of future use through the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Finally, benefits and opportunities were identified based on the perceptions of the participants and the results of the activity. The results indicate that the visualization of the city can support comprehension activities and help identify improvements in development and quality practices. Furthermore, this tool was positively perceived in the context of software engineering courses. Most of the acceptance and experience constructs were evaluated positively, with some opportunities identified regarding ease of use and visualization comprehension. In general, the visualization helped identify possible opportunities required for software applications under review.

Many courses in the software engineering area are centered around team-based project development. Evaluating these projects is a challenge due to the difficulty of measuring individual student contributions versus team contributions. The adoption of distributed version control systems like Git enables the measurement of students' and teams' contributions to the project. In this work, we analyze the contributions within five software development projects from undergraduate courses that used project-based learning. For this, we generate visualizations of aggregated Git metrics using inequality indexes and inter-decile ratios, which offer insights into the practices and processes followed by students and teams throughout the project development. This approach allowed us to identify both inequality among students' contributions and development processes with a non-steady pace, rendering a useful feedback tool for instructors and students during the development of the project. Further studies can be conducted to assess the complexity and value of students' contributions by analyzing their source code commits and other software artifacts.

Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching and learning methodology where students develop projects under real conditions to acquire the knowledge and develop the skills required for their profession. In this article we discuss the lessons learned from two teachers who implemented different PBL approaches in three courses from the Bachelor in Computer and Informatics at the University of Costa Rica, during three semesters. We discuss the main considerations and decisions associated to project design elements and teaching practices. Among the main benefits identified by teachers when using PBL are the high motivation of students and the natural development of soft skills. Among the greatest challenges are (1) the design of learning assessment, considering technical aspects, soft skills, self- and peer- evaluations; (2) continuous feedback to students on their progress in the project and in team dynamics (and its consequent time investment); and (3) the necessary balance between designing a challenging and realistic project that enables the achievement of the course's learning objectives. We recommend the use of agile methodologies such as Scrum, which align very well with PBL principles, as well as the use of hybrid PBL methodologies, which include complementary didactic strategies to achieve the learning objectives of the course.