一句话：提出一个基于微服务的协作式软件开发项目教学框架，用于提升学生解决真实问题的技术、社交与认知技能。
问题：组织需要能团队协作解决真实业务问题、快速交付软件产品的开发者，而高校培养学生同时具备技术、社交与认知技能颇具挑战。方法：本文提出一个协作式软件开发项目框架，课程围绕微服务架构，学生组队选择真实企业问题，将应用功能拆分为具有标准化接口、可独立开发测试部署的微服务，以此促进任务分配、协调与协作式问题解决。评估：课程前期以概念和实验作为铺垫，项目结束后要求学生反思开发过程；问卷调查显示，该框架能有效提升学生的技术、社交与认知技能，同时指出需与其他课程更紧密协作以完善整体学习课程。
Experienced and skillful software developers are needed in organizations to develop software products effective for their business with shortened time-to-market. Such developers will not only need to code but also be able to work in teams and collaboratively solve real-world problems that organizations are facing. It is challenging for educators to nurture students to become such developers with strong technical, social, and cognitive skills. Towards addressing the challenge, this study presents a Collaborative Software Development Project Framework for a course that focuses on learning microservices architectures and developing a software application for a real-world business. Students get to work in teams to solve a real-world problem of their own choice. They are given opportunities to recognize that the software development process goes beyond writing code and that social and cognitive skills in engaging with each other are also essential. By adopting microservices architectures in the course, students learn to break down the functionalities of their applications into smaller pieces of code with standardized interfaces that can be developed, tested, and deployed independently. This not only helps students to learn various technical skills needed for developing and implementing the functionalities needed by the application in the form of microservices but also facilitates task allocation and coordination among their team members and provides a platform for them to solve problems collaboratively. Upon completion of their projects, students are also asked to reflect on their development process and encouraged to think beyond the basics for better software design and development approaches. The course curriculum incorporates the framework, especially for the student team projects. The earlier teaching weeks introduce a combination of concepts and lab exercises to students as the building blocks. The survey studies show that the framework is effective in enhancing the students' learning of technical, social, and cognitive skills, while further improvements, such as closer collaboration with other courses, can be done to improve a holistic learning curriculum.
@inproceedings{LauKJ24,
title = {Teaching Software Development for Real-World Problems using a Microservice-Based Collaborative Problem-Solving Approach},
author = {Yi Meng Lau and Christian Michael Koh and Lingxiao Jiang},
booktitle = {ICSE},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1145/3639474.3640064}
}