The skills to effectively manage software development teams and to productively interact with a project manager are important in the computing professions. Teaching these skills in a traditional academic setting, however, is challenging. To support the experiential learning of these skills, we established a collaboration between two computing courses, a sophomore-level one and a senior-level one, where the seniors serve as managers of teams of sophomores on a semester-long project. This paper describes the collaboration and evaluates it in terms of student learning and experience based on three iterations of that collaboration. The associated course materials and evaluation instruments are made publicly available.

The ability to manage software development teams is an important skill in the computing professions. The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge devotes a separate knowledge area to this skill. It is difficult, however, to effectively teach software project management (SPM) in a traditional undergraduate setting, because it is logistically challenging to find software development teams that students can manage over a sufficiently long period of time. Thus, students often cannot apply in practice the SPM theory they learn in class and, in particular, the soft-skill aspects of SPM. To enhance student learning and experience of SPM, we have established a collaboration between a senior-level SPM course and a sophomore-level introduction to software development (ISD) course. In this collaboration, SPM students serve as managers of teams of ISD students during a semester-long project. We designed a methodology to evaluate the collaboration in terms of student learning and experience. This methodology is based on student surveys, reflections, meetings with students, and analysis of student artifacts (e.g., meeting minutes). We are in the third year of a longitudinal study in which we evaluate the collaboration after each semester it runs and evolve that collaboration based on the collected evidence. This poster describes the collaboration, the evaluation methodology, the continuous improvement process for evolving the collaboration, lessons learned on the educational benefits of the collaboration, and issues, such as the amount of managers/ authority, nature of managers/ tasks, logistics, and scheduling.

Process modeling allows for analysis and improvement of processes that coordinate multiple people and tools working together to carry out a task. Process modeling typically focuses on the normative process, that is, how the collaboration transpires when everything goes as desired. Unfortunately, real-world processes rarely proceed that smoothly. A more complete analysis of a process requires that the process model also include details about what to do when exceptional situations arise. We have found that, in many cases, there are abstract patterns that capture the relationship between exception handling tasks and the normative process. Just as object-oriented design patterns facilitate the development, documentation, and maintenance of object-oriented programs, we believe that process patterns can facilitate the development, documentation, and maintenance of process models. In this paper, we focus on the exception handling patterns that we have observed over many years of process modeling. We describe these patterns using three process modeling notations: UML 2.0 Activity Diagrams, BPMN, and Little-JIL. We present both the abstract structure of the pattern as well as examples of the pattern in use. We also provide some preliminary statistical survey data to support the claim that these patterns are found commonly in actual use and discuss the relative merits of the three notations with respect to their ability to represent these patterns.