Download: PDF, activity materials, optional voting software, ICSE 2005 slides (PDF), ICSE 2005 slides (PowerPoint).
“The Groupthink specification exercise”
by Michael D. Ernst.
In ICSE Education and Training Track: Software Engineering Education
in the Modern Age: Challenges and Possibilities, PostProceedings of ICSE
'05 Education and Training Track, vol. 4309 of Lecture Notes in
Computer Science, (St. Louis, MO, USA), Dec. 2006, pp. 89-107.
A previous version appeared as
“The Groupthink specification exercise”
by
Michael D. Ernst
and
John Chapin.
In ICSE
2005, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software
Engineering, (St. Louis, MO, USA), May 2005, pp. 617-618.
Teaching students to read and write specifications is difficult. It is even more difficult to motivate specifications — to convince students of the value of specifications and make students eager to use them. The Groupthink specification exercise aims to fulfill all these goals. Groupthink is a fun group activity, in the style of a game show, that teaches students about teamwork, communication, and specifications. This exercise teaches students how difficult it is to write an effective specification (determining what needs to be specified, making the choices, and capturing those choices), techniques for getting them right, and criteria for evaluating them. It also gives students practice in doing so, in a fun environment that is conducive to learning. Specifications are used not as an end in themselves, but as a means to solving realistic problems that involve understanding system behavior.
Students enjoy the activity, and it improves their ability to read and
write specifications. The two-hour, low-prep activity is self-contained,
scales from classes of ten to hundreds of students, and can be split into
2 one-hour sessions or integrated into an existing curriculum. It is
freely available from the author (mernst@cs.washington.edu),
complete with lecture slides, handouts, a scoring spreadsheet, and
optional software. Instructors outside MIT have successfully used the
materials.
Download: PDF, activity materials, optional voting software, ICSE 2005 slides (PDF), ICSE 2005 slides (PowerPoint).
BibTeX entry:
@incollection{Ernst2006,
author = {Michael D. Ernst},
title = {The {Groupthink} specification exercise},
booktitle = {ICSE Education and Training Track: Software Engineering
Education in the Modern Age: Challenges and Possibilities,
PostProceedings of ICSE '05 Education and Training Track},
series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
volume = {4309},
pages = {89--107},
publisher = {Springer},
address = {St.\ Louis, MO, USA},
month = dec,
year = {2006}
}
(This webpage was created with bibtex2web.)
Back to Michael Ernst's publications.