Decision Visibility and Product Thinking in Software Engineering Education: A Conceptual Model of Quality-Oriented Reasoning

Persistent software quality problems continue to occur despite advances in software engineering methods, tools, and standards. This paper proposes a conceptual explanation suggesting that such problems may partly reflect how software engineers are educated to reason about qualityrelevant decisions under uncertainty. The study introduces decision-oriented product thinking as an engineering competence concerned with trade-offs, prioritization, value-sensitive reasoning, and long-term quality consequences. Drawing on software engineering education research, industry skills-gap studies, and state-of-practice investigations in requirements engineering, the paper develops a conceptual model linking educational framing, decision visibility, product-thinking practices, and quality-oriented reasoning. The analysis identifies an opportunity to integrate existing forms of decision-oriented learning more systematically across software engineering education. Although contemporary curricula and educational practices already address elements of decision reasoning, quality-relevant choices, assumptions, alternatives, and trade-offs are not necessarily made consistently visible as objects of instruction, reflection, and assessment. The paper proposes decision visibility as an integrative educational mechanism for connecting these existing elements with product-thinking practices and quality-oriented reasoning. The contribution of the study is conceptual and explanatory. In addition to proposing a conceptual model, the paper introduces educational design principles and classroom-oriented applications intended to make quality-relevant decisions more visible during software engineering education.