Large team projects in software engineering courses

Abstract

A key goal of educators teaching software engineering is to provide students with useful experience that will benefit them after graduation. A key component of this experience is usually a class project that is meant to expose students to the issues associated with real software development efforts. Unfortunately, educators rarely have the time required to manage software projects in addition to their normal pedagogical duties. As a result, many software engineering courses compromise the project experience by reducing the team sizes, project scope, and risk. In this paper, we present an approach to teaching a one-semester software engineering course in which approximately 30 students work together to construct a moderately sized (22 KLOC) software system. This approach provides a more realistic project experience for the students, without incurring significant managerial overhead for the instructor. We present our experiences using the approach for the spring 2004 software engineering course at The College of William and Mary.

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