Developing a Taxonomy for Software Engineering Education Through an Empirical Approach

Abstract

Background: With just over 50 years since birth, software engineering gathers more and more topics. This diversity, which shows how broad and prolific the area is, also greatly fragments knowledge. Efforts to develop classifications and taxonomies can collaborate in ordering this knowledge. Objective: This work aims to contribute to organizing software engineering education knowledge, a sub-area in which formalization is still necessary. Method: We propose a process for the construction of controlled vocabularies. We instantiated this process twice; first, using automatic clustering techniques to analyze over 1,000 articles; and then, we focused on concepts related to teaching techniques and methods. Results: We present a taxonomy with 60 terms with covers concepts to be taught, methods to use, and where to do it. The ‘teaching approaches and methods’ category covers 26 terms with their definitions and most relevant references. Implications: The taxonomy can be used by teachers and researchers to understand the breadth of the field, to place their research initiatives in a broader context and to conduct more rigorous searches in the literature. We believe it is necessary to continue working on the taxonomy’s expansion and also to carry out validation activities, if possible, including experts’ validation.