Making winners for both education and research: Verification and validation process improvement practice in a software engineering course

Abstract

An empirical study is provided on teaching Verification & Validation (V&V) process practice in a real-client graduate level software engineering course which makes students and researchers mutual winners. From our observation and experiences during the course, on the education side, several reflection-in-action techniques are used to educate and train students. These include inspections, architecture review boards, grading criteria, monitoring of their quality management plans, student critiques of their project experiences, and client evaluations. On the research side, students' feedback, evaluation, and critiques provide not only previous empirical evidence for the researchers' research proposal, but also great opportunities to refine their research methods from lessons learned from the course, and in turn to improve the course quality.