There is an acknowledged need for teaching realistic software development in project courses. The design space for such courses is wide, ranging from single-semester to two-semester courses, from single-client to multicustomer courses, from local to globally distributed courses, and from toy projects to projects with real clients. The challenge for a nontrivial project course is how to make the project complex enough to enrich students’ software engineering experience, yet realistic enough to have a teaching environment that does not unduly burden students or the instructor. We describe a methodology for project courses that is realizable for instructors, improves students’ skills, and leads to viable results for industry partners. In particular, recent advances in release management and collaboration workflows reduce the effort of students and instructors during delivery and increase the quality of the deliverables. To enable release and feedback management, we introduce Rugby, an agile process model based on Scrum that allows reacting to changing requirements. To improve early communication, we use Tornado, a scenario-based design approach that emphasizes the use of informal models for the interaction between clients and students. The combination of Rugby and Tornado allows students to deal with changing requirements, produce multiple releases, and obtain client feedback through the duration of the course. We describe our experience with more than 300 students working on 40 projects with external clients over a 4-year period. In the latest instance of our course, the students have produced more than 7000 builds with 600 releases for eleven clients. In an evaluation of the courses, we found that the introduction of Rugby and Tornado significantly increased students’ technical skills, especially with respect to software engineering, usability engineering, and configuration management, as well as their nontechnical skills such as communication with the client, teamwork, presentation, and demo management. Finally, we discuss how other instructors can adapt the course concept.

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Continuous delivery is a set of practices and principles to release software faster and more frequently. While it helps to bridge the gap between developers and operations for software in production, it can also improve the communication between developers and customers in the development phase, i.e. before software is in production. It shortens the feedback cycle and developers ideally use it right from the beginning of a software development project.In this paper we describe the implementation of a customized continuous delivery workflow and its benefits in a multi-customer project course in summer 2013. Our workflow focuses on the ability to deliver software with only a few clicks to the customer in order to obtain feedback as early as possible. This helps developers to validate their understanding about requirements, which is especially helpful in agile projects where requirements might change often. We describe how we integrated this workflow and the role of the release manager into our project-based organization and how we introduced it using different teaching methods.Within three months 90 students worked in 10 different projects with real customers from industry and delivered 490 releases. After the project course we evaluated our approach in an online questionnaire and in personal interviews. Our findings and observations show that participating students understood and applied the concepts and are convinced about the benefits of continuous delivery.

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