The Company Approach to Software Engineering Project Courses

Teaching larger software engineering project courses at the end of a computing curriculum is a way for students to learn some aspects of real-world jobs in industry. Such courses, often referred to as capstone courses, are effective for learning how to apply the skills they have acquired in, for example, design, test, and configuration management. However, these courses are typically performed in small teams, giving only a limited realistic perspective of problems faced when working in real companies. This paper describes an alternative approach to classic capstone projects, with the aim of being more realistic from an organizational, process, and communication perspective. This methodology, called the company approach, is described by intended learning outcomes, teaching/learning activities, and assessment tasks. The approach is implemented and evaluated in a larger Master's student course.

I. Introduction

Preparing computer science (CS) and software engineering (SE) students for real-world jobs in industry is a challenging task. Feedback from industry has shown that software engineering topics such as testing, code reviews, release management, and teamwork are particularly important from a real-world perspective [1]. To meet such demands, the ACM/IEEE-CS joint task force on computing curricula recommends the inclusion of software engineering projects in a computing curriculum [2]. In such a project course, students are typically working in teams and developing a larger software system for a particular customer. These project-based courses that can span the entire last year of a curriculum are often referred to as capstone courses. Capstone project courses have existed for many years [3], and several success stories have been reported in the literature [4]–[6].