On the Prospects and Concerns of Integrating Open Source Software Environment in Software Engineering Education

Open Source Software (OSS) has introduced a new dimension in software community. As the development and use of OSS becomes prominent, the question of its integration in education arises. In this paper, the following practices fundamental to projects and processes in software engineering are examined from an OSS perspective: project management; process, workflows, and collaborative activities; modeling and specification; deployment of standards; documentation; and quality assurance and evaluation. Based on a pragmatic framework, the prospects of integrating OSS in a traditional software engineering curriculum are outlined and concerns in realizing them are given. In doing so, the cases of the adoption of OSS process model, use of OSS as a Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool, OSS as a standalone sub-system, and open source code reuse are considered. We present some of the trade-offs that could help educators in decision making towards the use of the OSS environment in software engineering pedagogical contexts. The significance of openly accessible content in general and its relation to OSS in particular is briefly highlighted.