Analyzing Motivation in Personal Software Process Education Course with a Qualitative Approach

Kyushu Institute of Technology offers a class of the PSP (Personal Software Process) training course. One of the problems of the class is low completion rate and professors have been trying to resolve the situation. One of the trials is formalizing the motivation process of the PSP course trainees by using state transition modelling with the state, values of the factors regarding the trainee’s motivation and a set of stimuli from the course instructors and environment. Conceptually, instructors can decide effective scenarios for the trainees and develop effective learning environment with the assumption on the state and corresponding state transition function of the trainees. However, it is difficult to develop and analyze such scenarios and environment based on the actual motivation states inside trainees. We use a qualitative approach, GTA with systems engineering modeling in analyzing causal conditions, intervening conditions, action strategies for success scenarios and environment.