Educating software engineers of the future: Software quality research through problem-based learning

Software Engineering graduates are expected to enter the workforce with both technical and soft skills. In addition, software quality is a topic that is becoming increasingly important both because of educational and industry requirements. Software engineering lecturers need to bring their research into the classroom. Bringing all of these together can pose the lecturer with a dilemma that is not easily solvable. This paper presents how problem-based learning, a pedagogical methodology that is popular in medicine and other disciplines, can be used to accomplish these goals in a single course module. It describes a research project which analyses the implementation of problem-based learning within a M. Sc. Software Engineering Quality Module, and evaluates the outcomes against published expectations.