Dans un contexte où le développement logiciel évolue rapidement, souvent sous l’impulsion du monde industriel, il est essentiel pour les institutions d’enseignement supérieur de maintenir un lien étroit avec les pratiques professionnelles. Cette connexion permet d’adapter les programmes de formation aux réalités du terrain et de garantir la pertinence des compétences transmises aux étudiant·e·s.

It’s time for the January exams. Three years ago, my colleague Benoît Vanderose and I created a verification and validation course for the MSc in Software Engineering students. From the start, we both thought we needed a practical exam where students actually perform V&V tasks. So, for our exam, students have to analyze a codebase, read SonarQube reports, refactor code, correct bugs, and write tests. This was quite unusual for them (most courses are evaluated using projects or paper exams), and the students’ reaction three years ago was, let’s say, interesting.

How do you get 4th graders (16yo.) to understand software engineering in 1h30? That’s the challenge we (Jérôme Maquoi, Benoît Vanderose and Xavier Devroey) set ourselves on Thursday April 25, 2024. Rather than making them write code, we chose another route: get them to build a 16-floors tower of wooden blocks in under 32 minutes with constraints similar to a software development team in full rush. 😁