Educating Project Stakeholders: A Preliminary Report

Abstract

In college coursework, we take care to educate future professional software engineers on how software development process works. Computer Science and Software Engineering students across the globe study software process models, gather requirements, design, implement and test their software, work on software maintenance, learn to submit bug reports, build project roadmaps, construct UML diagrams, and deploy software. Yet, ever since the emergence of consumer-facing software, software development often is a collaboration between professional software engineers and multiple stakeholders whose education, professional expertise, and general experience lie outside of computing. We teach future software engineers how to develop software. Why don't we do the same with other future stakeholders? This paper is a description of a pilot Software Engineering Without Programming course developed and taught at our university for the first time in 2020. In this early stage report (the course is ongoing as of the submisison deadline, but will have been completed by the time of the workshop) we outline the need for the course, its learning objectives, its organization, and the expected results.