Abstract:
Software engineering students often struggle to reason about how development activities interact across the software lifecycle. Requirements, design, implementation, and testing are frequently learned as isolated topics, leading to fragmented process-level mental models. This work-in-progress paper explores whether narrative structures can function as cognitive scaffolds for software engineering reasoning. We propose an instructor-guided framework in which large language models generate short instructional narratives aligned with software engineering concepts. The framework maps narrative structures such as the Hero’s Journey, the Fichtean Curve, and the Three-Act Structure onto software engineering reasoning tasks involving lifecycle progression, architectural evolution, and testing processes. The paper presents a framework for using narrative-based representations to support process-level reasoning and outlines future classroom evaluation.
PPIG 2026 - 37th Annual Workshop
Narrative Structures for Process-Level Reasoning in Software Engineering