Software engineering education at universities plays an increasingly important role as software quality is becoming essential in realizing a safe and dependable society. This paper proposes a practical state transition model (Practical-STM) based on the Organizational Expectancy Model for the improvement of software process education based on the Personal Software Process (PSP) from a motivation point of view. The Practical-STM treats an individual trainee of the PSP course as a state machine, and formalizes a motivation process of a trainee using a set of states represented by factors regarding motivation and a set of operations carried out by course instructors. The state transition function of this model represents the features or characteristics of a trainee in terms of motivation. The model allows a formal description of the states of a trainee in terms of motivation and the educational actions of the instructors in the PSP course. The instructors are able to decide effective and efficient actions to take toward the trainees objectively by presuming a state and a state transition function of the trainees formally. Typical patterns of state transitions from an initial state to a final state, which is called a scenario, are useful for inferring possible transitions of a trainee and taking proactive operations from a motivation point of view. Therefore, the model is useful not only for improving the educational effect of the PSP course, but also for the standardization of the course management and the quality management of the instructors.

The modeling of an application domain and its specific knowledge description language are important for developing knowledge-based systems. A rapid-prototyping approach is suitable for such developments since in this approach the modeling and language development are processed simultaneously. However, programming languages and their supporting environments which are usually used for prototyping are not necessarily adequate for developing practical applications. We have been developing an integrated development environment for knowledge-based systems, which supports all the development phases from the early prototyping phase to final commercial development phase. The environment called INSIDE is based on a Prolog abstract machine, and provides all of the functions required for the development of practical applications in addition to the standard Prolog features. This enables the development of both prototypes and practical applications in the same environment. Moreover, their efficient development and maintenance can be achieved. In addition, the effectiveness of INSIDE is described by examples of its practical application.