Teaching the Software Engineering Process Emphasizing Testing , Rationale and Inspection ( TRAIN )

Students learning software systems development at the University of Heidelberg follow the TRAIN process. This tool supported process emphasizes the early phases of software development by combining different activities and artefacts such as requirements engineering, quality assurance as well as graphical user interface and system design. By the use of TRAIN students are being enabled to finish large software projects. TRAIN focuses especially on various decisions (rationales) in the development process and on several quality assurance activities like testing or inspection. This paper gives a short overview of the TRAIN–process, how it is taught in software engineering courses and how it is supported by a tool called Sysiphus.