Students with practical software project experience perform better at related university subjects — A truth or a myth?

Abstract

There is an ongoing discussion about the pros and cons of allowing Bachelor and Master students to become employees at companies and to work besides their study. Even more, in the field of Software Engineering, this issue is even seen as a prerequisite. However, are such students really achieving better results in their studies? In this paper, we deal with this question at least from the perspective of Software Project Management skills. We start with the hypothesis that their work (and project) experience yields to better results in a lecture dealing with these topics. Then we describe the setting of a first pre-study, which was embedded in a lecture about software quality and management at the Technical University of Košice. Next, we discuss the results. In our setting, it turned out that the difference is marginal in average. Even though the scores of students with previous practical experience are not so diverse at the beginning of the lecture, students with prior experience perform slightly better at the end of the course.