Final Year Students' Approaches to Implementing Complex Distributed Systems

Understanding how final year students build complex software systems is critical for determining whether desired graduate outcomes have been met, for identifying curriculum gaps, and for designing scaffolding and support structures. A large body of work focuses on the programming strategies employed by novice programmers, with few existing research in understanding programming strategies and development focus of final year students, in particular with respect to non-functional requirements. In this paper, we analyse consecutive revisions of 77 students across two cohorts that implemented a large and complex Distributed Systems assignment with several non-functional requirements. To obtain a qualitative overview of the students' approach to software development, we manually read and tagged all sourcefiles in all assignment revisions with specific development focus categories. Our analysis identifies how the students' development focus evolves throughout the assignment timeline. We visualise the software development process and identify several areas that require further support.