The software engineering process is a growing concern for many software development organizations. The need for well-educated software engineers is bringing new software engineering programs to universities. In many programs, software process education adds up to a few hours of lectures in an introductory software engineering course. This paper presents the structure and the content for a full, one-semester course on software processes, which has been designed in close collaboration with industry. The course is based on a software process called UPEDU (Unified Process for EDUcation), pronounced Yoopeedoo, and has been customized from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for the educational environment. Many artifacts derived from a project case study are used as examples or templates. The content of the course is oriented towards the cognitive skills needed to perform the various activities required in the software process.

Disciplines like software engineering evolve over time by studying some practices and feeding back those results to improve the practice. The empirical approach presented in the paper is used to analyze the nature of the information shared during peer review meetings (PRMs) held in an industrial software engineering project. The results obtained show that although a PRM is categorized as a verification practice, it is also a golden opportunity for project personnel to share information about technical solutions, a decision's rationale or quality guidelines. The contribution of PRMs is not restricted to the rapid detection of anomalies; they also provide the opportunity for project team members to share implicit information. PRM efficiency cannot solely be measured through an anomaly detection rate.

This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive activities in collaborative software development. This approach has been developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and cognitive psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our understanding of software development by observing professionals at work. The goal is to derive lines of conduct or good practices based on observations and analyses of the processes that are naturally used by software engineers. The strategy involved is derived from a standard approach in cognitive science. It is based on the videotaping of the activities of software engineers, transcription of the videos, coding of the transcription, defining categories from the coded episodes and defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This project presents two original contributions that make this approach generic in software engineering. The first contribution is the introduction of a formal hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable comparison of various types of observations. The second is the merging of psychological and statistical analysis approaches to build a cognitive model. The details of this new approach are illustrated with the initial data obtained from the analysis of technical review meetings.