Learning CS Subjects of Professional Software Development and Team Projects

Professional Software Development (PSD) course is about the emerging profession of software engineering which involves developing, deploying, testing, and maintaining software. Currently, the Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computing Science (CS) joint degree programme of University of Glasgow (UofG) and Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT) carries out both PSD and Team Projects (TP) courses concurrently, where students are expected to apply the theory learnt from PSD to real-world projects in TP. TP is a practical project continuation from knowledge learnt in the PSD course. Both PSD and TP last two trimesters in parallel. This paper analyses the advantages and disadvantages of the current learning methods in PSD and TP. It is possible that there is still room for improvement in the current system. Tо further analyse the current learning system, a comparison of how the Software Engineering course is taught in other universities is also performed, from where ideas and methodology are proposed. The proposed methodology is analyzed and discussed from the suggestions or feedback of the CS students who have gone through both PSD and TP courses. The purposes are to improve the learning effectiveness of both PSD and TP courses.