In situ education: approaches for software practitioners

The educational needs, material content and learning context for software practitioners are different from that of undergraduate students in the tertiary education system. This paper discusses various aspects of these differences and describes a set of methods and approaches that we have used successfully in the continuing education of our team of software developers. The characteristics and suitability of these approaches to attain various educational objectives are discussed and our experience in using them is described. Our experience suggests that the most effective approaches are also relatively inexpensive to implement and can be integrated into the schedule of the busiest development teams. The experiences reported here may also be valuable to educators in helping to frame the education program for masters courses aimed at practicing professionals