| Abstract: |
The need for teaching advanced methodologies in the academia became an essential “ingredient” in software engineering curriculum, in order to diminish the gaps created between academia and industry. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) is one of the latest transformative approach to software delivery that become more prevalent in industry. This approach combines cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. The objective of this study is to learn the academic requirements of CICD and apply it on fundamental course and then to identify the difficulties during the learning process based on the students’ feedbacks.
Firstly we conducted a literature review to learn how academy is dealing with this challenge. Recent studies show that introducing CICD topics introduces complexities due to the learning curve of the involved tools and the amount of time available for teaching these topics. Furthermore, we found a limited research that deals with effective teaching practices for incorporating continuous integration and delivery concepts into traditional software engineering courses.
The second part of the research aimed at reviewing the existing and most common technologies in the industry, in order to choose the appropriate configuration for educational environment. We assumed that the decision is crucial for the implementation and the teaching processes as well as for the success of the course. However, we had a limited experience in this context.
At the last part, after the implementation of the academic environment we conducted two surveys during the course run. The first before the implementation and the second at the end. Results show that most of the students were not aware with the CICD environment, and the students had difficulties to understand the value of the complex environment. The learning curve was relatively long and most of the students believed that the development process will be improved by CICD, however many found it as more demanding. |