Meeting the challenge of large-scale software development in an educational environment

This paper describes a final-year Master's course in large-scale software development. A number of issues such as closeness to an application domain and executing the software on a real target system are stressed in order to imitate an industrial environment. The experience gained from the course is discussed. In particular, effort data (in terms of man-hours) from the course are presented, both from the plan devised by the students, and the actual outcome. Furthermore, it is discussed how the data can be used to create an experience base for the future. The objective for next year's course is to let the students plan their projects based on the experience base. The experience base will also form the basis to complement the course with a complete experience factory.