Despite recent efforts to improve the effectiveness of software engineering education, most
approaches do not equip students with non-technical skills and fail to be practice-oriented. Brest
University provides the software engineering by immersion paradigm as an alternative to other
education systems. Shifting to the constructivism paradigm as far as possible, this education
system is entirely based on a 7-month project, performed by a 6-students team within a virtual
company and tutored by an experienced software engineer.
The ISO/IEC 12207 standard is a reference framework of software engineering processes. This
standard provides the basis of our reference decomposition into processes/activities/tasks and
apprenticeship scenes. Issued from professional didactics, the analysis of activity distinguishes
two kind of activity: productive and constructive. The former is work-oriented while the latter
helps the actor to improve his/her own practice. Hence, constructive activity is apprenticeship
and personal development. Analysing apprenticeship scenes provides an ability model of our
immersion system. The model is defined in terms of its constituent competencies areas, each of
which is further defined in terms of its constituent competencies families; a family corresponding
to an activity of the reference decomposition. Each family is associated with a set of cohesive
abilities.
The ability model establishes a structure that directly supports the personal and team
construction process of the knowledge and skills required to practice engineering of a software
project. Each student periodically fills this structure while auto-analysing the tasks performed
and him/her achievement level with the abilities defined in the model. This periodic inventory is
supported by eCompas, a tool intended to manage development, assessment and value-added
of competencies over the course of a curriculum or a professional career.