Learning from students' mistakes in Software Engineering courses

An important component of most Software Engineering courses is the software development team project. For most Software Engineering courses, the software development project provides to undergraduate students their best opportunity to learn about the "real-world" of software development, including team work, understanding client's requirements, quality assurance, project management, and so on. The software development project in an undergraduate environment provides several benefits, but it also poses considerable challenge in fairly and accurately evaluating its results and applying the lessons learned in its improvement. In this article, we discuss issues and practices for improving the team project from the perspective of an introductory Software Engineering course at Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We provide a contextualized evaluation, based on artifact defects produced by students. Ours results reinforces the belief that an understanding of cause-effect defects relationships offers a simple and low-cost method for improving the Software Engineering course and team project.