A Case Study in Teaching Agile Software Product Line Development.

The development of Software Product Lines (SPL) hold promise to improve the efficiency of writing and maintaining large software projects, but SPL engineering can be difficult to teach in a software engineering classroom for many reasons. The development of a non-trivial SPL typically takes longer than the time available in a typical semester, student interest in SPL engineering is rarely inherent, and learning outcomes from different approaches to SPL engineering are not always consistent or aligned with traditional software engineering learning goals. Further, applying SPL methods in an agile development environment can be challenging because agile methods typically prioritize features and bug fixes over SPL (maintainability) goals. In this work we investigate a couple of research questions including: can incorporating SPL into an undergraduate software engineering course sequence improve student learning outcomes related to writing maintainable, reliable, and reusable code? We are also interested in answering the question of whether incorporating SPL can improve the quality of documentation created by students. To work toward answers to these questions we present a case study of the two-semester development of an SPL in a senior-level undergraduate software engineering course sequence using a real-world mobile application. We present key strategies for motivating positive learning outcomes including an adapted Scrum process designed to incorporate SPL engineering. We found that our approach improved student application of reusability theory, benefitted documentation quality, increased student satisfaction with the course, and increased the percentage of code written reused by students from semester to semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]