Implementation of a software engineering course for computer science students

Abstract

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.

Is software engineering training enough for software engineers?

“…This was an exemplary case of a misunderstanding between stakeholders due to different assumptions. Execution of a project is today an established part of most Software Engineering courses [1, 7,8,10,[14][15][16][17]. Such projects usually cover different phases, from the requirements elicitation and specification to the implementation, validation and verification.…”

“…The software engineering course we analyze here [7] was attended by computer science students. They have attended basic courses in mathematics but very few courses that are parts of traditional engineering curricula, for example physics.…”

On the teaching of distributed software development

“…The practical part of the course will be in the form of a project aiming at developing a software product, as is common in many software engineering courses [8,9,11,12,13,19]. Since we intend to teach distributed software development it is important that the students already are familiar with e.g.…”

“…The need for preparing computer science students to the "real world" software engineering problems has already been recognized and is addressed by introducing practical projects and teamwork as a regular part of software engineering courses [8,9,11,12,13,19]. To our knowledge however, teaching distributed software development at university is very rare, and is restricted either to existing software engineering courses [3] or to case studies and student projects [2].…”