Success with the project-intensive model for an undergraduate software engineering course

Abstract

There is a tremendously increasing need for software in all areas of society (the software crisis) and hence a need for increased numbers of software engineers as well as increased productivity of the current software engineers [1]. Improving the productivity of software engineers necessitates new ways of viewing software, better procedures for creating it, and most importantly, better education of current and prospective software engineers regarding the development process [2]. Software engineering is thus rapidly being incorporated into undergraduate and graduate computer science curricula and is emerging as a separate discipline. In particular, the senior level project course has received much attention as a way to provide a software engineering experience at the undergraduate level. Project teams in such courses usually consist of two to four students. This paper describes a project-intensive software engineering course in which twenty-three students worked effectively as a single project team.