Michael E. Caspersen
Michael Kolling
Abstract
Programming is recognized as one of seven grand challenges in computing education. Decades of research have shown that the major problems novices experience are composition-based---they may know what the individual programming language constructs are, but they do not know how to put them together. Despite this fact, textbooks, educational practice, and programming education research hardly address the issue of teaching the skills needed for systematic development of programs.
We provide a conceptual framework for incremental program development, called Stepwise Improvement, which unifies best practice in modern software development such as test-driven development and refactoring with the prevailing perspective of programming methodology, stepwise refinement. The conceptual framework enables well-defined characterizations of incremental program development.
We utilize the conceptual framework to derive a programming process, STREAM, designed specifically for novices. STREAM is a carefully down-scaled version of a full and rich agile software engineering process particularly suited for novices learning object-oriented programming. In using it we hope to achieve two things: to help novice programmers learn faster and better while at the same time laying the foundation for a more thorough treatment of more advanced aspects of software engineering. In this article, two examples demonstrate the application of STREAM.
The STREAM process has been taught in the introductory programming courses at our universities for the past three years and the results are very encouraging. We report on a small, preliminary study evaluating the learning outcome of teaching STREAM. The study indicates a positive effect on the development of students’ process competences.
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Index Terms
- STREAM: A First Programming Process
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Reviews
Alexandre Bergel
As stated in the introduction, "the task of teaching programming did not become easier over the last decades." The increasing complexity of programming languages and development tools plays an important role in teaching programming. According to the authors, the teaching curricula of many universities focus too much on technical bits, instead of teaching a concise software development process. This paper is intended for teachers, students, and anyone involved in a software engineering curriculum. It promotes STREAM, a simple and easy-to-implement software process development composed of six elementary steps: create skeleton class, create tests, define instance variables, evaluate alternative representations, refine implementation, and implementation methods. Caspersen and K?lling exemplify STREAM on a simple simulation problem and provide a preliminary evaluation of teaching STREAM. The authors point to an important deficiency of many university programs: a failure to address the software process in introductory programming courses. STREAM makes important points in this respect, but there still needs to be an extended evaluation. The paper reads well. Caspersen and K?lling have a nice writing style and present an exciting in-depth analysis. Online Computing Reviews Service
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