Assigning grades to commits, Kanban board issues, and overall software project quality.

What is it about?

It's hard to evaluate student software engineering projects, especially when they are team projects, and each team may be working on something entirely different. We looked at three dimensions of that evaluation, applying the Goal/Question/Metric approach, and techniques borrowed from content analysis (a code book, and independent raters). We report on what we found.

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Why is it important?

It's important to help students gain more authentic experiences with software engineering before entering the workplace. Having some way to measure whether students are achieving learning goals is important for several reasons, including feedback to students, course grades, and data for research on the effectiveness of various interventions in software engineering education. But, it seems that the closer our software engineering courses get to authentic real world practice, the harder it becomes to evaluate. The measurements become more subjective, time-consuming, and subject to bias. So it is important to study what we are doing, and how we can improve.