State-based monitoring and goal-driven project steering: field study of the SEMAT essence framework

At Carnegie Mellon University in Silicon Valley, the graduate master program ends with a practicum project during which students serve as software engineering consultants for an industry client. In this context, students are challenged to demonstrate their ability to work on self-managing and self-organizing teams. This paper presents a field study of the Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT) Essence framework. The objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of the Essence’s novel state-based monitoring and goal-driven steering approach provided by the Essence kernel alphas and their states. The researchers conducted the study on seven graduate master student teams applying the approach throughout their practicum projects. The research methodology involves weekly observation and recording of each team’s state progression and collecting students’ reflection on the application of the approach. The main result validates that the approach provides student teams with a holistic, lightweight, non-prescriptive and method-agnostic way to monitor progress and steer projects, as well as an effective structure for team reflection and risk management. The paper also validates that the Essence kernel provides an effective mechanism for monitoring and steering work common to most student software projects. This includes the work done during project initiation as well as the work done at the project or release level. Support for technical work should come from additional practices added on top of the kernel, or by extending or altering the kernel definition. The conclusion is that the approach enables students to learn to steer projects effectively by addressing the various dimensions of software engineering. Hence the approach could be leveraged in software engineering education.