Abstract

Being aware to the important role of proper software documentation on one hand and being acquainted with the students' views regarding this issue on the other, we decided to examine the effects of facing the students with bad documentation or the lack of it on their views, as represented by a software project they have to design, develop and test.. This research was performed within a software engineering workshop for Computer Science students. For addressing the soft skills issues required by the industry, the course was delivered as a workshop with various (inter and intra) team based activities.

The objective of outlining the importance of software maintainability issues was achieved through a hybrid team-based role play. The workshop consists of three assignments, following a typical software design and development process, in which each team had to continue the work performed by another team, thus creating a dependency between the team members as well as between the teams as might happen during real life maintenance. The main research study objective was to examine the effect of employing this kind of a hybrid team-based role-play and peer-review on the students' learning process regarding product documentation for future maintainability. Data referring to the students' perceptions is presented and analyzed in addition to student reflections on the workshop which demonstrate their expanded understanding of documenting the design and application process.

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