Mika Ohtsuki Lecturer

Research overview

Research that supports the education of highly skilled engineers based on an understanding of the entire software development life cycle Support for software engineers who will form the pillars of Society 5.0
I am working to develop a software engineer educational support system that targets the entire software life cycle.

■Software life cycle
As we transition from an information society to Society 5.0 (Super Smart Society), the implementation of a variety of services depends heavily on computer software. I believe that the increasing sophistication and complexity of software makes training highly skilled software engineers who can take responsibility for the software life cycle, from planning through development and administration, a high priority for society. The development of software consists of various processes, such as planning, requirement analysis, programming, and testing, and engineers need to learn advanced knowledge and skills for each of these.
In my research, I have studied tools that support education in terms of the knowledge and skills required for software development from a variety of perspectives. However, the environment that encompasses software development is little understood, and education that deepens understanding of the deliverables generated by each process remains inadequate.

■Educational support for software engineers
Based on this situation, I am working to build a learning environment that integrates my laboratory’s previous projects: REMEST, a requirement management learning tool; a UML diagram authoring tool; and ALECSS, a learning support system for software developers. Key features of this system will be functionality for inspecting deliverables from REMEST and the UML diagram authoring tool in upstream processes, as well as the ability to visualize deliverables from each process so that professors and other faculty members can assess the work being done by their students.

Currently, I am designing and implementing functionality that will allow me to collect and analyze data related to the learning process and learning outcomes in an actual classroom setting. In the future, I may also develop a visualization tool that uses VR. In order for students to go on to play an active role as software engineers in this age of online education and digitization of society as a whole, my expectation is for this system, once it undergoes additional improvements, to enter into wide use in software technology education so that it can contribute to the education of highly skilled engineers.