A workbench for project oriented software engineering courses

Abstract

We present the Computer Science Scholar's Workbench, a tool kit written in Pascal suitable for research and teaching. It has advantages over contemporary workbenches, UNIX and INTERLISP: a host to support the tool kit costs less than $3,000, the tools are free-available in source from publications, and the tools are written in Pascal which is widely used in academic environments. We discuss a) course requirements and problems unique to project oriented software engineering classes, b) the tools we've chosen for the workbench, and c) how they may be used to ameliorate or solve many of the problems. We report our experience using the workbench and evaluate it in terms of cost, performance, portability, extensibility, and effectiveness.