Delivering a Course in Software Engineering: A Hands On Approach

In teaching software engineering, it is a major challenge to integrate applied methodology and theory into the practice of software development. Today teaching a course in software engineering involves a theoretical approach with white board and doing a project at the end of the course. Teaching Software engineering as a course involves many disciplines and requires delivering lectures accompanied by lecture demos and hands on lab sessions to accompany individual constituent topics or areas that form the bricks and mortar of this course. Only when the bricks and mortar of software engineering have delivered a solid foundation, is it then the software engineering as a course will be delivered in a true and meaningful sense. This paper presents a method to teach Software Engineering using the applied approach that the author designed and successfully used.