Real world experiences in a software engineering course

Abstract

How can we get students to understand software engineering? This is the basic question we will try to answer in this paper. We describe a course in which students learn about and use software engineering principles to create a software system that will be used in an actual setting. In this paper we describe this course and document our experience across several terms. In addition we describe the software system implemented as this has relevance to the process of accreditation. In the context of continuous improvement, the experiences represent lessons learned for ongoing offerings of the course. Our goal is to offer a course where students are engaged in a project where the only way to accomplish the goals for the course are to use the methodologies studied in class. The purpose of this paper is to document how we teach this software engineering course and also to document our experiences with students in the course.