Some observations from releasing student projects to the public

Abstract

Software engineering educators often struggle to strike a balance between making the project “real” so that students can learn in a realistic context and using an “imaginary” project tweaked to optimize learning goals of the module. This paper describes our observations when we tried to make an established software engineering project module more realistic by introducing to it a public release of the software built by students. For various aspects of the module, we describe risks we had anticipated, measures we had applied to mitigate those risks, unanticipated challenges that emerged during the module, possible measures that we think can counter those additional challenges, and other positive and negative points of interest that we observed during the module. We hope that this paper will help other educators who plan to incorporate a public release to their project modules.