Adventure Cycles A Software Engineering Approach

In this paper we discuss using a case study to demonstrate the software engineering process from requirements, specification, preliminary user manual, prototyping, design, implementation and testing as well as some postimplementation details such as maintenance and extendibility/reusability. Each semester a case is developed that is pivotal to a final year Software Engineering course. Groups, usually of four students, undertake the entire systems development life cycle. The project is developed over one semester (12 weeks) in four separate phases with an assignment completed for each phase. The Adventure Cycles case was run differently from the cases used in previous semesters in that it was done during the three hours of lectures each week. These exercises replaced the standard (PowerPoint-driven) lectures. In parallel the groups developed a separate project (for 2004, in the first semester Dogs R Us and in the second Residential Tenancy). Examples from past semester projects are also made available to the students. The lessons learnt from these cases are available here. Overall the student performance in the class improved, as did their assessment of the course and its components. This has encouraged us to continue with this case-driven approach to teaching software engineering.