How Students Perceive Professional Competencies in Software Projects: A Cyclical Study on Human Behavior in Business Process Management Context
Resumo
Context: Computing education must go beyond technical training to encompass the development of professional competencies. Objective: This paper aims to characterize the evolution of students’ perceptions regarding the importance and difficulty of four professional competencies throughout a semester-long integrated project involving three disciplines: Business Process Management (BPM), project management, and enterprise management systems. Method: Forty-seven undergraduate students worked in multidisciplinary teams to solve real-world problems using Business Process Management Notation (BPMN) and interface prototyping. At the end of each of the four project cycles, students assessed the perceived importance and difficulty of teamwork, project planning, client negotiation, and technical challenges. The results showed that while students consistently rated all competencies as highly important, they perceived increasing difficulty over time, particularly in teamwork and project planning. This trend indicates a growing awareness of the complexity of non-technical skills. Conclusions: The use of cyclical self-assessment effectively revealed behavioral patterns and learning needs, offering valuable insights into human behavior in software education and supporting more integrated curriculum strategies.
Referências
Barcellos, M. P., Silva Souza, V. E., Costa, P. D., and Aguiar, C. Z. d. (2024). Using extension projects to improve software engineering education and software quality: The experience of the “ricardo de almeida falbo” software engineering practices laboratory. In Proceedings of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality, pages 552–562.
Bastarrica, M. C., Perovich, D., and Samary, M. M. (2017). What can students get from a software engineering capstone course? In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on software engineering: software engineering Education and Training Track (ICSE-SEET), pages 137–145. IEEE.
dos Santos, S. C. (2023). Transforming Computing Education with Problem-Based Learning: From Educational Goals to Competencies. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Dos Santos, S. C., Vilela, J., and Vasconcelos, A. (2023). Promoting professional competencies through interdisciplinary pbl: An experience report in computing higher education. In 2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pages 1–9.
Iacob, C. and Faily, S. (2019). Exploring the gap between the student expectations and the reality of teamwork in undergraduate software engineering group projects. Journal of systems and software, 157:110393.
Licorish, S. A., Galster, M., Kapitsaki, G. M., and Tahir, A. (2022). Understanding students’ software development projects: Effort, performance, satisfaction, skills and their relation to the adequacy of outcomes developed. Journal of Systems and Software, 186:111156.
Liu, M., Zhang, W., Shang, T., and Xie, T. (2025). The research on course teaching reform of embedded systems based on the three-cycle pbl approach. In 2024 3rd International Conference on Educational Science and Social Culture (ESSC 2024), pages 244–250. Atlantis Press.
Maia, D., dos Santos, S. C., Cavalcante, G. F. G., and Falcão, P. A. A. (2023). Managing soft skills development in technological innovation project teams: An experience report in the automotive industry. In 2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pages 1–9.
Nobre, M. and Vilela, J. (2024). An experience report of utilizing the bpm wheel serious game to evaluate bpm learning in higher education. In Anais do XXXII Workshop sobre Educação em Computação, pages 353–364, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC.
Shen, S.-T., Prior, S. D., White, A. S., and Karamanoglu, M. (2007). Using personality type differences to form engineering design teams. Engineering education, 2(2):54–66.
Vilela, J. (2020). An empirical evaluation about using models to improve preliminary safety analysis. In Anais do II Workshop em Modelagem e Simulação de Sistemas Intensivos em Software, pages 66–75, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC.
Vilela, J., dos Santos, S. C., and Maia, D. (2024). Impact of team formation type on students’ performance in pbl-based software engineering education. In CSEDU (2), pages 327–338.
Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Regnell, B., and Wesslén, A. (2012). Experimentation in software engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
