Context: Estimates of software development effort may be given as judgments of relationships between the use of efforts on different tasks – that is, as relative estimates. The use of relative estimates has increased with the introduction of story points in agile software development contexts.

Objective: This study examines to what extent relative estimates are likely to be more accurate or less time-consuming to produce than absolute software development effort estimates and to what extent relative estimates can be considered developer-independent.

Method: We conducted two experiments. In the first experiment, we collected estimates from 102 professional software developers estimating the same tasks and randomly allocated to providing relative estimates in story points or absolute estimates in work-hours. In the second experiment, we collected the actual efforts of 20 professional software developers completing the same 5 programming tasks and used these to analyse the variance in relative efforts.

Results: The results from the first experiment indicates that the relative estimates were less accurate than the absolute estimates, and that the time consumed completing the estimation work was higher for those using relative estimation, even when only considering developers with extensive prior experience in story point–based estimation for both tasks. The second experiment revealed that the relative effort was far from developer-independent, especially for the least productive developers. This suggests that relative estimates to a large extent are developer-dependent.

Conclusions: Although there may be good reasons for the continued use of relative estimates, we interpret our results as not supporting that the use of relative estimates is connected with higher estimation accuracy or less time consumed on producing the estimates. Neither do our results support a high degree of developer-independence in relative estimates.

Background: Software project management activities help to introducing software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's progression. 

Objective: Present and evaluate an approach to help students acquire theoretical and practical knowledge and experience real-world software projects' challenges. The approach combines a serious game and a design-implement task in which students develop a controlled-scale software system.

Methods: To evaluate our approach, we analyzed the students' perceptions collected through an online survey, their project plans, and their final reports using thematic analysis.

Results: Results suggest that the approach promotes knowledge acquisition, enables students' progression, reinforces theoretical concepts, and is properly aligned with the course's learning outcomes.

Conclusion: The approach seems to help introducing software process models in Software Engineering courses. Our experience can also be inspiring for educators willing to apply our approach in similar courses.

The vision of network-centric operations is to increase operational capabilities through networked collaboration. NATO and its member nations state this vision in strategic documents at a very high level of abstraction. While suitable for giving an overall feel, current documentation renders the steps toward implementing those visions largely unsupported. We outline a method, based on agile requirements engineering, for converting high-level strategic visions into capabilities, whose form lend themselves to incremental implementation. We illustrate the use of this method in two cases that concern both operational capabilities and technical capabilities. We also  show how  the method enables one to prioritize  which capabilities to develop first. We conclude that some form of explicit methodology to span the gap between strategic visions and implementing those visions is necessary.