Failproof Team Projects in Software Engineering Courses

The computer science department of the University of Pittsburgh offers two undergraduate and two graduate courses in software engineering in which we emphasize the importance of general engineering principles for software development. For the last ten years the undergraduate courses have been based on team projects. This structure has advantages: students see immediately the relevance of what they learn, and the team setting leads to a better understanding of what they learn. The projects in the two courses are of different types. In one course the result is the formal specification and design of a software system. In the other, the teams implement such a system, but emphasis is on testing rather than on the implementation itself. The success of each project is guaranteed by making it open-ended. A team establishes a list of priorities that is to ensure that a useful product will have been built by the time the term ends. We discuss the nature of team projects, and our evaluation scheme.