Lecture on software assessment at the University of Bern 2013

On Wednesday, November 20, I will give a lecture on software assessment to second year students from the University of Bern. The lecture is part of the introductory course to software engineering, and it comes right after the software quality one.

Software quality tackles things from general to the specific by instilling rules that might have an impact on future development. Software assessment goes the other way around and offers skills and tools that help developers tackle specific problems. Interesting enough, the easier software assessment is, the more quality there is.

Assessment is tough to teach outside of a real context. The problem with context is that you have to be in it to relate to it. Talking about it in general can be entertaining, but it has less impact.

The setup of the course happens to require the students to work in teams and to develop actual projects over the course of the semester. In this particular case, they have to build Android apps. To make them relate to the idea of crafting custom analysis, I will use their own systems to exemplify assessment scenarios.

In the meantime, here is a teaser picture showing the system attraction view for each of the 9 systems. The grouping shows the systems that tackled the same topic. The visualizations reveals that even when tackling similar requirements and even in a short amount of time (a handful of weeks) distinct teams will produce radically different structures. Software development is a complex game and we have to approach it accordingly.