The Allure and Risks of a Deployable Software Engineering Project: Experiences with Both Local and Distributed Development

Abstract

The student project is a key component of a software engineering course. What exact goals should the project have, and how should the instructors focus it? While in most cases projects are artificially designed for the course, we use a deployable, realistic project. This paper presents the rationale for such an approach and assesses our experience with it, drawing on this experience to present guidelines for choosing the theme and scope of the project, selecting project tasks, switching student groups, specifying deliverables and grading scheme. It then expands the discussion to the special but exciting case of a project distributed between different universities, the academic approximation of globalized software development as practiced today by the software industry.