Iterative development and commercial tools in an undergraduate software engineering course

Abstract

Many undergraduate software engineering courses combine team projects with discussion of development cycle concepts. It can be difficult to connect these elements in a coherent way, especially when the lecture is a broad survey and the project is sharply focused on meeting the needs of a client.This paper describes one attempt to bridge this gap, by incorporating the iterative development of a classroom example and an object-oriented process based on two commercial software tools. Although the course time frame (an academic quarter) is too short for significant iteration on the team project, students can participate in an accelerated version of the process by making a small increment to the non-trivial example.This approach retains the benefits of a realistic, client-centered team development project, while providing experience in a contemporary software development process based on commercial CASE tools.