Designing a Syllabus for a Course on Empirical Software Engineering

Abstract

Increasingly, courses on empirical software engineering research methods are being offered in higher education institutes across the world, mostly at the MSc and PhD levels. While the need for such courses is evident and in line with modern software engineering curricula, educators designing and implementing such courses have so far been reinventing the wheel; every course is designed from scratch with little to no reuse of ideas or content across the community. Due to the nature of the topic, it is rather difficult to get it right the first time when defining the learning objectives, selecting the material, compiling a reader, and, more importantly, designing relevant and appropriate practical work. This leads to substantial effort (through numerous iterations) and poses risks to the course quality.

This chapter attempts to support educators in the first and most crucial step in their course design: creating the syllabus. It does so by consolidating the collective experience of the authors as well as of members of the empirical software engineering community; the latter was mined through two working sessions and an online survey. Specifically, it offers a list of the fundamental building blocks for a syllabus, namely, course aims, course topics, and practical assignments. The course topics are also linked to the subsequent chapters of this book, so that readers can dig deeper into those chapters and get support on teaching specific research methods or cross-cutting topics. Finally, we guide educators on how to take these building blocks as a starting point and consider a number of relevant aspects to design a syllabus to meet the needs of their own program, students, and curriculum.