Exploring Students' Behaviors and Perceptions in Continuous Measurement of Software Projects

Continuous software engineering is increasingly ingrained and widely adopted in development projects. These projects have extended their processes by utilizing software measurement tools with dashboards to monitor and understand development best practices, quality, and evolution. Exploring development perceptions and behaviors in software engineering education and training contexts is needed to better understand how tools could aid development processes. The goal is to explore students' perceptions and development behaviors in software engineering projects that continuously measure contributions. We conducted a case study, mainly focusing on agile software engineering and quality best practices, and gathered behaviors and perceptions through mining repositories and applying surveys. Our results show acceptance of continuous measurement, where most respondents agreed that it benefited their software development process. We found benefits in engineering and quality practices such as continuous integration and configuration management. Some of the perceived benefits related to agile practices did not always align with observed behaviors. Our results suggest that continuous measurement in software engineering education had mostly positive perceptions and outlooks on behaviors. These findings are encouraging for adopters of continuous measurement tools in education and training contexts.