The software engineering capstone

Abstract

One of the largest challenges facing educators teaching undergraduate software engineering courses is providing the students with meaningful experiences they will find useful when they complete their undergraduate education. Those experiences should include all phases of the software development process, and to be as realistic as possible they should also include the uncertainty and continual change present in any real project. In addition, those experiences need to include working with others in a team, which can affect the morale of some students and also poses challenges to the professor when the time to assign grades arrives. In this paper we discuss how we have tailored the software engineering capstone sequence at the U.S. Air Force Academy to address these issues.

Using student performance predictions in a computer science curriculum

“…This grading policy reduces the effect that a particular student's past performance would have on that student's grade in these courses. It is interesting to note that CS 453 and CS 454 are essentially treated as a year long course in terms of material coverage and project work [5], but there is only a weak correlation between the course grades for these courses. Students are moved into different groups between CS 453 and CS 454, however, so this weak correlation may also be indicative of the significant effect that group performance has on individual course grades in these courses.…”

A student-enacted simulation approach to software engineering education

“…There are several other educators in software engineering education research [15], [16] who offer similar group-oriented approaches to software engineering education. Two approaches are the long-running Real World Laboratory [17], Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, and the Studio at Carnegie Mellon University [18], Pittsburgh, PA.…”

Improving software engineering education through an empirical approach

“…Team members must co-ordinate their activities closely because time and budget constraints allow no room for misunderstandings. Capstone courses involving real-life experiences in software engineering have become commonplace in several universities [5,9]. The reason for such a phenomenon is simple: no simulated assignment, despite its complexity, can capture the project dynamics involved in building real world applications [12].…”

“…Universities which are educating computer science professionals have an important responsibility in the provision of professional skills to their students [5,6,16]. The course at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, named IIC2154: Proyecto de Especialidad, is a capstone course designed to transfer these skills to its students.…”