A class project to prepare software engineering students for their capstone projects

We discuss the design of a class project which we have introduced to improve our Software Engineering course presented on the third-year graduate level at our institution. For this project, the whole class collaborate to design and implement a single, reasonably large software system. We believe that the class project has the potential to provide an intensive learning experience for our students and may have several educational benefits. We investigate the impact of the class project on student academic achievement and project success in terms of the quality of the code of the developed system. We gauge the impact of the class project by analysing differences the academic performance of the students in the course. Further, we analyzed the differences in assessment marks assigned to projects. We also evaluate the code quality by observing variations in selected software code metrics of the source code of the software systems delivered by the students. Although the results are inconclusive, we feel the class project provides a unique opportunity for students to get hands-on experience in the development of real-world software for industry.