Combining education, industry, and empirical studies in Software Engineering

Software industry is one of the most pervasive industries today and has a great impact on our day-to-day lives. At the same time, the quality of software systems is directly related to the quality of software engineers -- it is the responsibility of software engineering educators to provide students with relevant skills needed for the development of high-quality software systems. Amongst the cornerstones of developing high-quality software systems are industry-relevant experience and the ability to quantify certain aspects of the software development process. In this paper, we describe our experience of performing an empirical study on students, during a software engineering course, on an industry-relevant topic taught by an industry expert -- the understandability of models in model-driven engineering.