Test-driven development (TDD) has gained recent attention with the popularity of the Extreme Programming agile software development methodology. Advocates of TDD rely primarily on anecdotal evidence with relatively little empirical evidence of the benefits of the practice. This research is the first comprehensive evaluation of how TDD affects software architecture and internal design quality. Formal controlled experiments were conducted in undergraduate and graduate academic courses, in a professional training course, and with in-house professional development projects in a Fortune 500 company. The experiments involved over 230 student and professional programmers working on almost five hundred software projects ranging in size from one hundred to over 30,000 lines of code. The research also included a case study of fifteen software projects developed over five years in a Fortune 500 corporation. This research demonstrates that software developers applying a test-first (TDD)

Teaching (and therefore learning) eXtreme Programming (XP) in a university setting is difficult because of course time limitations and the soft nature of XP that requires first-hand experience in order to see and really learn the methods. For example, iterations are either shorter or fewer than appropriate. In this paper we present the properties to tune when designing an eXtreme Programming course. These are the properties we gathered by conducting three XP labs as part of our software engineering teaching. Within this paper we describe our set-up as well as the important properties. Lecturers and teachers can use this property system and combine it with their own constraints in order to derive a better XP lab for their curriculum.

Capstone projects, which provide the opportunity for student teams to experience ‘real-world ’ software development, form part of the final semester of study in many computing degrees. This paper describes a number of development methodologies that are currently used both in industry and software development capstone projects. Such projects are carried out under a unique set of constraints due to their nature as instances of experiential learning in an educational setting. These constraints are discussed and then a number of methodologies are described along with a discussion of the suitability of the methodology for capstone projects. Issues that must be addressed by instructors are considered. Finally recommendations are made and a plan for a study into capstone development methodologies is described. The goals of this paper are to provide an overview of current methodologies available for software development capstone projects, to clarify the benefits and problems encountered when using these methodologies in capstone projects, and to indicate suitable resources for those involved in these projects.

Nowadays, many empirical studies are carried out based on educational projects. In these cases, instructors put forward requirements on educational projects from the perspective of education, and researchers also provide their requirements from the perspective of empirical study. How to design educational projects successfully from both educational perspective and research perspective becomes a practical challenge. In this paper, we present a successful case to resolve this problem: we designed two educational projects in a software architecture course, based on which an empirical study about creativity in software development was carried out. Our methods to design these educational projects can be reused for other software engineering courses associated with empirical study.