Teaching an industry-oriented software engineering course

Project courses at the NTH: 20 years of experience

“…Bruegge [3,2] reports on a course with a real, external client, where groups of 12-30 students have successfully delivered systems of 15-27 KLOC for one semester, going through phases from requirements analysis to acceptance test. For the spring 92 course, technical writers were also included in the course.…”

“…Most other project courses (as the ones referenced above) either use smaller problems or at least problems which are more strictly defined at the outset. For instance, the course described in [2] starts with providing the students with a problem statement containing functional and global requirements to the system, and in the course reported in [6] the students are provided with an architectural design. Our teams are exposed to problems to which neither the clients nor the course organizers know the solution in advance.…”

The cross-course software engineering project at the NTNU: four years of experience

“…The distinguishing feature of this project, compared to other projects that have been reported e.g. in the CSEE&T conference series [1,2,8,13,14,15], is the way it is shared between four courses taught simultaneously during the project term. While most other educational SE projects are either in-course or own-course, this is thus a cross-course project.…”

“…For instance, the students' work can be part of a bigger system, where much is pre-developed [1], or the students can be organized in large teams, in super-groups with sub-groups [2]. The 2 nd year SE project at the NTNU has partly adopted both these approaches, but the ratio of predevelopment is significantly smaller than [1], and the team size (4-6 students) is much smaller than in [2]. However, whereas the projects discussed in [1,2] took place within one course, the project discussed in this paper is shared across several courses of the same term.…”

“…The 2 nd year SE project at the NTNU has partly adopted both these approaches, but the ratio of predevelopment is significantly smaller than [1], and the team size (4-6 students) is much smaller than in [2]. However, whereas the projects discussed in [1,2] took place within one course, the project discussed in this paper is shared across several courses of the same term.…”