A multi-national, multi-institutional study of student-generated software designs

This paper reports a multi-national, multi-institutional study to investigate Computer Science students ’ understanding of software design and software design criteria. Student participants were recruited from two groups: students early in their degree studies and students completing their Bachelor degrees. Computer Science educators were also recruited as a comparison group. The study, including over 300 participants from 21 institutions in 4 countries, aimed to understand characteristics of student-generated software designs, to investigate student recognition of requirement ambiguities, and to elicit students ’ valuation of key design activities. The results indicate that with experience, students become more aware of ambiguous problem specifications and are able to address more of the requirements in their software designs, that they use fewer textual design notations and more graphical and standardized notations, that they systemically ignore groupings and interactions among the different parts of their designs, and that students change their valuation of key design activities in response to changes in problem-solving context. 1