TESMA : Requirements, Design and Implementation of a Teaching Specification, Management and Assessment tool

The definition and organisation of programs related to their courses of educational institutions
is a very complex and exhaustive task. There is a demand for such a solution by
the educational institutions, as they need a detailed program descriptions for students
and instructors. This task gets even more complicated if these programs and courses
needs to be certified according to some international learning standards.
At the moment, the availability of such methods or tools is very limited, except
for some ad-hoc guidelines, which are use by some few universities, e.g. the Cornell
University. Most of the institutions (e.g. University of Luxembourg) allows the professor
to us their own methods for specifying their courses. Hence, most of the institutions are
sharing similar problems, but using their own defined methods (e.g. naming conventions
for its programs).
At an university, professors are working in various domains and using therefore their
own methods for specifying their courses, which results often in an incomplete program
and course description. Methods such as SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of
Knowledge) and CS2103 (Computer Science Curricula 2013) which are program certifications
according to an international learning standard are almost not known and
used. Thus, programs and courses from different institution cannot be compared, since
there is no common structure and process for specifying them.
In this master thesis, we present TESMA (Tool for Educational Specification Management
and Assessment of teaching programs), a tool based on a domain-specific language,
which is dedicated to the teaching domain, for specifying, managing, and assessing
programs. The Messir (Scientific Approach to Requirements Engineering) development
method has been used for defining the concept and the requirements of the tool. Our
research concentrates on the domain-specific language (DSL) in order to define requirements
and improving the quality of the DSL’s.
We focus on the development of an intuitive and maintainable domain-specific language,
usable by people coming from different domains, e.g. software engineers, natural
sciences, social sciences, linguistic, and so on. This thesis describes the requirements, the
concepts, the realisation, and implementation of the tool, which are based on a domainspecific
language of high quality for specifying programs. The quality of our DSL is
assessed by a complete used cases related to the University of Luxembourg.