A Software Development Capability GPA to Represent Students' Proficiency in Software Development

This paper presents a new vector model for assessing and representing students' capability for developing good quality software. The resulting metric called the SoftWare Development Capability GPA (SWDC GPA), uses a four point scale to indicate students' proficiency in the skills required for each of the four primary activities of software development namely: requirements elicitation and modeling; requirements analysis and software design; coding and unit testing; and integration and system testing. The focus on software development is a rational choice since over 30% of Computer Science (CS) graduates land jobs in software engineering; and even computing personnel not employed as software engineers, engage in software engineering as part of their daily professional activities.