Lean Startup-Driven Software Engineering Education

Abstract

In the past decades, software has become continuously ubiquitous driving modern economies’ innovation, growth and sustainability. According to recent studies, almost all of the prominent industry sectors are today influenced by software in an ever increasing manner. Since the 1960s when software engineering stems many significant changes have occurred to advance the development of all types and scales of software products. Meanwhile, the need for software engineering education (SEE) has emerged by playing an essential role in ensuring students are up to date on software technologies, processes, and practices popular in various industries. To meet the market demands and provide students with realistic context, the approaches to learning software engineering are becoming more interdisciplinary and team-centered, comparable to startup contexts. In this PhD work, I answer the following research questions: (1) To what extent are software engineering trends present in SEE research? (2) What set of common software engineering practices employed in lean software startups is transferable to the SEE context? (3) What is the impact of lean startup practices on software engineering students and curricula? To that end, I utilize (1) a literature review, (2) mixed-methods approaches (data and methods triangulation) in gathering empirical evidence, and (3) design based research. In the first phase of the research, I pinpoint the relevance of the lean startup in SEE through an extensive literature review. I gather empirical evidence on lean startup practices and then assess their potential transferability to SEE in the second research phase. I demonstrate that the lean startup is an emerging trend in SEE research. I also demonstrate that students can acquire soft, hard, and project management skills in a more realistic context in the introduction of the growth phase of lean startup practices through external course activities. Software engineering curricula can benefit from the model and framework that I propose and validate, thus facilitating the knowledge transfer of lean startup practices to software engineering curricula.