Incorporating Real Projects Into a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

Software engineering researchers and practitioners are increasingly more concerned about non-technical issues like user involvement and interaction as a way to improve software development process efficiency. This issue is also present in software engineering education. The IEEE/ACM software engineering guidelines highlights that an undergraduate course in this matter should have a real-world basis. In this paper, we present an undergraduate program that connect students with real-world projects throughout their studies. To evaluate educational results, we performed a survey with 111 students from this software engineering program. The results indicate that students in the end of this program has a much better chance of taking users' desires into consideration instead of focusing on software implementation.

I. Introduction

Software engineering is increasingly more dependent on user involvement, being more determinant to system success than schedule and budget goals achievements [1]. In a 2009 follow-up from her seminal paper, Shaw [2] speculates that, in the following ten years, problems faced by software engineers will be more “situated in complex social contexts, and delineating the problems’ boundaries is increasingly difficult.” This phenomenon influences how software engineering should be taught.