A Software Engineering Project Courses with Industrial Clients1

There is an acknowledged need for teaching realistic software development in project courses. The design space for such courses is wide, ranging from single semester to two semesters courses, from single client to multi-customer courses, from local to globally distributed courses, and from toy projects to projects with real clients. The challenge for a non-trivial project course is how to make the project complex enough to enrich the students’ software engineering experience, yet realistic enough to have a teaching environment that does not unduly burden students or the instructor. We describe a methodology for project courses that is realizable for instructors, improves the students’ skills and leads to viable results for industry partners. In particular recent advances in release management and collaboration workflows reduce the effort of students and instructors during delivery and increase the quality of the deliverables. To enable release and feedback management, we introduce Rugby, an agile process model based on Scrum that allows reacting to changing requirements. To improve early communication, we use Tornado, a scenario-based design approach that emphasizes the use of informal models for the interaction between clients and students. The combination of Rugby and Tornado allows students to deal with changing requirements, to produce multiple releases and to obtain client feedback throughout the entire duration of the course. We describe our experience with more than 300 students working in 40 projects with external clients over the duration of four years. In the latest instance of our course, the students have produced more than 7000 builds with 600 releases for eleven clients. In an evaluation of the courses, we found that the introduction of Rugby and Tornado significantly increased the students’ technical skills, in particular with respect to software engineering, usability engineering and configuration management as well as their non-technical skills such as communication with the client, team work, presentation and demo management. Finally we discuss how other instructors can adapt the course concept.