[swatcoder]

What do GitHub Actions and "team workflows" have to do with Data Structures? Even before he mentioned what he was inspired to ad, the course seemed scattered and superficial rather than foundational and preparatory.

I'm sure it's hard/impossible to drive one through the bureaucracy, but it sounds like he should have pitched a new course on Contemporary Team Practices or something.

[joshhug]

Like a lot of schools, our Data Structures course doubles as a soft intro to software engineering. I want them to know how to solve real problems efficiently and manage complexity.

Student time is incredibly precious. The hope here is that students will spend less than an hour on this, and in the process get a taste of how code reviews / automation can help teams function better. I'm hoping I can thread the needle and give them tools that will help them more efficiently complete their capstone project at the end of the semester, without spending too much of their time teaching them these tools.

FWIW, we have discussed the idea of a lower division software engineering class, and I was really hoping Pamela Fox would do this before she headed back to industry (interesting story there: https://blog.pamelafox.org/2022/05/my-experience-as-unit-18-...). We do have an upper div software engineering course as well, though it's not taken by most of our students.

[taftster]

That's a decent point, but at least they're trying? You can't just start a new course so easily, but adding these concepts into an existing course is much more feasible.