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Abstract-Like many engineering programs in Europe, the final part of most Swedish software engineering programs is a longer project in which the students write a Master's thesis. These projects are often conducted in cooperation between a university and industry, and the students often have two supervisors, one at the university and one in industry. In particular, the Bologna Process that is currently underway to align different higher educational programs in Europe, discusses industrial Master's theses as a major type of thesis project. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how best to support these projects and the different stakeholders involved. This paper presents a study where students and supervisors from software engineering Master's thesis projects at three different Swedish universities are interviewed. The intention of the study is to explore what the major problems of different stakeholders are during a project, and to investigate what type of support is needed. Based on the interview results, a support model is defined, which outlines the different types of support that are needed for different roles in Master's thesis projects.

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There has been much recent interest in how to help students in higher education develop their generic skills, especially since this is a focus of the Bologna process that aims to standardize European higher education. However, even though the Master thesis is the final and often crucial part of a graduate degree and requires many generic skills very little research has directly focused on them. In particular, there is a lack of such knowledge for engineering education programs. In this paper we present results from a survey where we asked 23 students from three different Swedish universities about which generic skills are needed and developed in a Master thesis project in Software Engineering. One outcome of our analysis is that there is a lack of understanding on how to define, and thus examine, generic skills in software engineering thesis projects.

Experience from industry shows that graduates in computer science generally lack many of the skills required in software development projects. This presents a challenge to academic institutions. This paper describes our experiences in implementing a course in software engineering at a Swedish university. A set of challenges is presented and it is described how these were met using a combination of lectures and project work. The results of the projects, the lessons we have learned, and the feedback from the students are discussed.