Teaching “design first” interleaved with object-oriented programming in a software engineering course

The importance of teaching a solid design methodology is well-recognized and is the goal of many software development courses. There is an ongoing debate concerning how to approach the learning and teaching of this skill, i.e., by focusing on “design first” by means of the UML formalism or by “OO programming first”, deferring the development of UML specifications. This work presents a teaching experience and curriculum content where a “design-first” approach was used to teach Object Oriented Design, incrementally interleaved with Object Oriented Programming aimed at implementing the modeled software through laboratory activities. Working in groups allowed the students to improve communication and collaboration skills, and the use of web 2.0 technologies, such as a wiki, allowed for better course management and for the deployment of a project involving all the students. This approach was used in two year-long courses with students who had slightly different backgrounds and dispositions. Also presented are a preliminary analysis of the written examinations and laboratory exercises; an analysis of common errors and student misconceptions and a preliminary quantitative measure of the results.