Incorporating societal topics in software engineering education: A case study of a customer-driven course

Abstract

Context: This full research paper presents a review of the project descriptions from a project based course designed around close collaboration with students and external customers. Our master course is based on four decades of software engineering experience and teaching at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In the scope of this work, we analyzed 45 customers’ project proposals over the past three years. Objectives: More precisely, we looked into 1) how many societal topics are present in project customers’ descriptions? 2) Which sustainable development goals if any, are addressed from the customers? 3) How do the trends of societal topics addressing SDGs in customer projects change over time? 4) Which categories of individuals do project descriptions target? Methods: We conducted a deductive thematic analysis utilizing open coding of the customers’ project descriptions. Results: We found that most project descriptions provided by the customers had a technical focus with a moderate portion of projects addressing societal topics for specific target groups. Contribution: The study’s overall outcomes contribute to the course’s future improvement and informs customers about the prospective socially relevant project proposals.