Software engineering problems and their relationship to perceived learning and customer satisfaction on a software capstone project

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2017.11.021Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Problems increase learning but decrease customer satisfaction in capstone projects.

  • In industrial capstone projects learning and customer satisfaction must be in balance.

  • Problems with some topics have a favorable learning vs. customer satisfaction ratio.

  • Effort estimation, testing and technology skill problems have the best cost-benefit ratio.

  • Task management problems have a very poor cost-benefit ratio.

Abstract

In educational projects, having students encounter problems is desirable, if it increases learning. However, in capstone projects with industrial customers, negative effects problems can have on customer satisfaction must be considered. We conducted a survey in a capstone project course in order to study problems, learning and customer satisfaction related to eleven software engineering topics. On the average, students working in the managerial roles learned quite a lot about each topic, and the developers learned moderately, but the degree of learning varied a lot among the teams, and among the team members. The most extensively encountered problems were related to testing, task management, effort estimation and technology skills. The developers contributed quite a lot to solving problems with technology skills, but only moderately or less with other topics, whereas the managers contributed quite a lot with most of the topics. Contributing to solving problems increased learning moderately for most of the topics. The increases were highest with maintaining motivation and technology skills. Encountering problems with task management, customer expectations and customer communication affected customer satisfaction very negatively. When considering both learning and customer satisfaction, the best topics to encounter problems in were effort estimation, testing, and technology skills.

Keywords

Capstone project
Education
Learning
Customer satisfaction
Problems
Software engineering

Cited by (0)

Dr. Jari Vanhanen is a university lecturer in software engineering with Aalto University, and has been the responsible teacher for the capstone software development project course at Aalto University since 2001. He has a D.Sc. degree from Aalto University.

Dr. Timo O. A. Lehtinen is a science adviser at the Academy of Finland. He is a former postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University and his research work has focused on software project retrospective methodologies and outcome. He has a D.Sc. degree from Aalto University.

Dr. Casper Lassenius is an associate professor at Aalto University. His current research interests include agile and lean software development, global software engineering, and software quality assurance. He has a D.Sc. degree from Aalto University.