A study on the quality mindedness of students

Abstract

Awareness of software quality is a skill generally agreed to be very important working in the industry, but we have observed that it receives little attention in the first-year programming education at universities. Besides preparing students for work life, we assume that good knowledge of software quality also helps computer science students to study more successfully. In this paper, we present a method for determining the quality-awareness, based on a diagnostic assignment and a questionnaire. Using the method we establish a baseline measurement in two courses that students typically follow in their first year, showing that quality awareness correlates with good grades. According to the baseline, the level of quality-mindedness of approximately half the students is not satisfactory.