Document to show you the important of this group and I will provide you with book description and several press releases — SOON

Working Title: TUES (NSF : Adapting Learning Units of Software Projects Management (USPM): Through Stable Knowledge Patterns or Unified Words

Motivations:

1. No uniformity in the course content and materials across many universities and industries

2. Limitation of offering

3. Not unified in what are been delivered in different universities

4. Not enough and qualified questions, assignments, and team projects

5. The scope and level of depth of the content and materials are very 

6. The challenges do not exist within many software engineering courses but the course content and techniques are challenges 

7. The instructors don’t usually have practical experiences in software engineering (lack of expertise)

8. Lack of existing unified content and materials for teaching the course on unified based where every student in different universities learn the right school of software engineering

9. The key knowledge areas in software engineering change over-time in a very faster base.

10. There is no an appropriate way for teaching software engineering to the level and depth to achieve maturity level.

Software engineering is not widely taught in almost all universities or in industry. The proposed project will accelerate the widespread adoption of an existing and successful course in software engineering by (a) developing and sustaining a cadre of academic, in-house, and commercial instructors via an instructor orientation course offered online; an ongoing online instructors’ forum; and a number of face-to-face instructor meetings; (b) offering and evaluating the course at collaborating research sites (including both universities and businesses)—in the process, the project will create one adaptation of the course to a purely online environment and another adaptation for a minority-serving university; (c) analyzing several collections of in-class activities to abstract a set of themes / patterns that can help instructors quickly create new activities as needed; and (d) extending instructional support material including grading guides and a pool of 100s of team projects and exam questions for teaching the course.

All of the materials—videos, slides, exams, grading guides, assignments, team projects, instructor manuals, etc.—are Creative Commons licensed. Most are available freely to the public. A few items designed to help teachers grade students work will be available at no charge, but only to teachers.

The instructional model devotes class time to coached activities, interactive discussions and student presentations by assigning students to view studio-produced lecture videos delivered via the Internet before coming to class. At San Jose State University, students report that they work harder in this course than most others; that the course is more difficult or challenging than most others; and that they learn more than in most other courses. A blind evaluation of student performance on final exams confirms the students’ impressions of their learning.

Intellectual Merits of the Proposal Activities

Q1. How important is the New CmpE 203 for advancing knowledge and understanding within its own field or across different fields?

∙      Potential of the New CmpE 203 to Advance Knowledge and Understanding

1. Topics covered: 

Cmpe 203 course teaches basic principles and methodologies of Software Engineering Management. This course deals basically with qualities, a project manager should possess like a complete understanding of how to prepare project plan, how to prepare proposal to be shown to customers, how to do comparative analysis, etc. The course also focuses on one major issue to be handled by project managers i.e. requirement analysis. This course is divided into various aspects of software management and gives hands on experience on each of the concerned areas. Various areas covered in this course are:

1. Requirement and challenges: This assignment makes student to scratch their minds in order to devise correct functional and non functional requirements for a given concept. The hardest part of this assignment is determining non functional requirements i.e. qualities a system is required to possess. This assignment helps student to understand the importance of understanding all the requirements before starting a project. 

2. Comparative study assignment – This assignment gives an insight on how to do comparison between two technologies, what factors to look at while comparing and how to document the findings.

3. Process documentation – This assignment gives a practice on how to document a process using project template and activity diagram. This assignment gives a hands on experience on preparing activity diagram and various rules to be kept in mind while preparing them.

4. Proposal writing – It is one of the most important assignment undertaken under this course. This assignment gives a good practice on how to do cost estimation, requirement surveys and prepare a proposal using the results drawn from different surveys. This assignment helps student to gain confidence in writing business proposal which is a very important part of business now a days.

5. Teaching Methodology: A new approach is adopted while teaching this course. Instead of going by the rule of software engineering principles, new cmpe 203 takes its own approach of teaching with the help of various examples and exercises. The class of this course is very interactive and brainstorming as students are required to prepare and participate a lot in the class in order to discuss and complete small exercises conducted in the class. Besides these exercises, students are also given a chance to practice through practical problem which makes the concept clearer and enhance applicability of the concepts learned during the course.

Q2. To what extent does the New CmpE 203 Proposal suggest and explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts?

∙      Originality, Creativity and the Potentially Transformative Nature of the New CmpE 203 course

Like any other software engineering course, new cmpe 203 does not restrict its 

boundaries to just the engineering of software projects. Instead, the concepts used in

 this course can be extended and applied into various other domains. The originality

of the course lies in its syllabus and concepts taught in the class. No books meant for

 this course details the process of requirement analysis for a system, while this 

course is structured in such a way that without understanding the fundamentals of

 requirement analysis, one can not proceed further. This course gives a detail study 

and practice of how to devise functional as well as non functional requirements of a

 system. This step is very crucial for any project be it software project or project 

from any other domain because if any requirement is wrongly stated the whole 

project development suffers. Next stage in this course is process documentation followed  by various other things like qualities of good managers, cost estimation, budgeting, proposal writing, comparative study and analysis, anti patterns, etc. All the concepts and practice exercises taken in this class are crucial for project managers and they have to deal with all these activities in their work. Thus this course not only teaches these things but also gives immense practical knowledge due to which students in the end have a very clear idea about how to handle such tasks and their important elements. 

The creativity of the course lies in the manner in which the course is taught. A very good approach to teaching and making things clear is by giving lots and lots of example. The professor also took the same approach. To make the class interesting and filled with fun, a lot of examples are given from our day to day life, which not only makes the things interesting but also helps in understanding the concepts and how to apply them in real applications.

“Practice makes a man perfect”. The best way to learn is through practice. The professor has its own way of teaching the subject with out creating burden on the students. The course is organized in such a manner that for every concept taught in the class small projects are given, which students have to do individually or in teams. This practice makes student to think really hard and they try to do well in projects which ultimately leads to good understanding of the subject. Besides project, a lot of small assignments and practical problems are given to students for their practice which gives them the opportunity to excel in the related field of study. Moreover, students are given opportunity to iterate with professor and clear their doubts. The professor arranges to iterate with each project group and also gives comment on their work and the areas they have to improve on in their project work. This helps student to grasp the concepts more deeply and they also get to know the areas of their weaknesses and concentrate on those areas more. As a consequence, students get into practice of applying the concepts of this course in their day to day life and hence, can easily apply these concepts later in their life for managing a project with ease.

Project management and Requirement understanding are the key concept needed at the beginning of any project and these two important concepts are beautifully taught in this course. This course does not emphasize on only software project management as the course is supposed to be, but it also teaches various other things which are necessary for a successful project manager like proposal writing, comparative study, process documentation and activity diagrams, anti patterns, etc. These concepts form the core of management of any kind of system and thus, this course can be easily transformed to be used as a management course for other areas like in mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering or in biotechnology etc.

Q3. How well conceived and organized is the New CmpE 203? Is there sufficient access to resources?

∙       Access to Resources Needed for New CmpE 203

This course is not one book based course. Hence, no text books are recommended for this course. This course can be learnt only through practice and “Practice makes a man prefect” The more a student practice, the more he understands a concept and hence, the more he gains from this course. To help students with their practice assignments and practical problems, professor is always available and he iterates with student to correct them and tell them their weaknesses and strong point. Moreover, the main concepts covered in this course are requirement analysis, process documentation, proposal writing, and comparative study. There are no books available in the market, which can teach the subject of requirement analysis. This can be done only by practicing a lot of examples and hence, the same approach is taken by the professor by giving a lot of examples and that too from our daily lives. This way student are tempted to work on and come up with their solutions in the class. Similar approach was taken for teaching process documentation where lot of examples from software management were taken and discussed in the class at length. For other areas traversed in this course, professor provided a well defined template as to what elements and topics are important in each of them and also explained the meaning of each sub part in the class and what goes in there. Thus, student can follow the template and can easily understand and prepare the document for their assignment. 

Also, professor maintains his own website and all the students are given access to the course material present there. The website contains a lot of articles and presentations related to course which are far more than enough for this course. Moreover, all the examples discussed in the class and a number of small assignments and practical problems are available on the website.

Broader Impacts/Commercial Potential of the Proposed Project

The broader impacts criterion identifies the important outcomes and consequences of New CmpE 203. The New CmpE 203  must demonstrate these impacts in ways visible to scientists and engineers as well as the general public. 

You may answer the following questions:

[1] ow well does the activity advance discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training, and learning?

The main objective of this course is to teach the concepts of requirement analysis, process documentation, how to write a proposal, do comparative study and apply these concepts in real world. The approach taken to teach these concepts is very unique and emphasis is made on practicing more. The participants through this course discovers the true way of documenting their ideas in a proper manner while understanding the requirements of a system and also learns to successfully estimate budget of a project and necessary steps to be taken while planning the project. Moreover, practicing on lot of examples and problems helped the participants grasp the concepts of this course from depth. Hence, this deep knowledge helps them to apply it to any system and with ease. 

With an advancement in the field and lessons learned by the students as a part of this course will in turn enable the transfer of this valuable knowledge to other course classroom and benefit a much larger section of society., with the production of much more skilled and informed engineers and managers who in turn would help in creating much more efficient software solutions.

[2] How well does the New CmpE 203  broaden the participation of underrepresented groups (e.g., gender, ethnicity, disability, geographic, etc.)?

Cmpe 203 course does not necessarily require classroom participation. The heart of this course is practice and practice only. Hence, this course can be modified easily to enable online tutoring. The course lectures can be video recorded and arrangements can be made where participants can ask their doubts online through some conferencing product (a large number of such products are easily available in the market). The participants can then attempt the individual assignments and practical problems and thus they can learn by practicing.

[3] To what extent will it enhance the infrastructure for research and education, such as facilities, instrumentation, networks, and partnerships?

This course teaches basic concepts of managing a system and devises new techniques for accomplishing them. Proper management of any project is crucial for its success and managing a project is not a single step process. It involves a number of activities and a lot of planning. This course also concentrates on various key areas in the management side. The knowledge from this course is not limited to the field of computers but it can be expanded across various other fields for managing and understanding the requirements of project of any kind. Along side, the course also gives good practice in documentation area like preparing analysis document, proposal document, which very few people know and face hard time in coming up with such type of documents. 

[4] Will the results be disseminated broadly to enhance scientific and technological understanding? What may be the benefits of the New CmpE 203  to society?

The field of software engineering lives on requirement understanding, gathering and documenting. Every process at any stage in engineering of the product is directly or indirectly related to requirements defined for that product. This course focuses on how to gather and understand the requirements of any given system and the basic difference between functional and non functional requirements. It also emphasizes on two type of functional requirement: external and internal to the system. Such a vast study about requirement understanding and interpretation helps the participants to understand the concept very deeply. Moreover, this knowledge is not limited to software engineering only but the same concept can be applied to other fields of engineering too. 

Other than requirement understanding, project manager also needs the knowledge of process documentation, cost estimation, project planning, proposal writing, etc. All these concepts are also focused on in this class. For process documentation, knowledge of activity diagram is a must and these are discussed at length in the class. Also various key elements required for writing a good proposal and all the important parts of proposal were also discussed. Last but not least, strategies were discussed for making comparison among different technologies and how to document the results in a comprehensive manner. Over all, this course provides a perfect combination of concepts that needs to be mastered in order to produce efficient managers.

A listing of key words or Phrases

– Identify the areas of technical expertise in science, engineering, or   education which are to be invoked in reviewing the proposal; and 

– Identify the areas of application that are the initial target of the technology.