Teaching Undergraduate Software Engineering Using Open Source Development Tools

Software engineering is a key topic in computing education. Many schools offer a projectoriented course, or multi-course sequence, to teach students both the theoretical concepts of software development as well as the practical aspects of developing software systems in a team environment. Typically, in these courses, students practice the principles of requirements analysis, project management, a development methodology, and effective teamwork through a small-tomedium software project. For such a course to maintain its currency and relevancy, it is important for students to be exposed to current tools and techniques for software development. Capabilities, such as project management, requirements tracking, configuration management, collaboration tools, and team communication are ideally experienced in a hands-on manner as part of the project. Commercial tools can be cost-prohibitive and difficult to learn to use effectively in a one or two semester course. At our institution, we investigated the use of open source software development tools that were easy to learn, transferable to other classes to enhance their perceived value to the student, and could be easily integrated into the existing project-oriented two-course sequence in software engineering. This paper describes the tools and their integration in the course, our experience, student’s reactions, and compares the results to previous course offerings.