Reporting about industrial strength software engineering courses for undergraduates

Abstract

How do you organize an "industrial strength" one semester educational programming project for up to 200 second year students? This paper reports on four years of experience with such projects at the University of Paderborn and the University of Braunschweig. Key properties of our project design are: starting with an existing large application, regular hard deadlines with peer reviews and presentations to a large audience, working in groups, applying project and configuration management tools, a standard system architecture with interchangeable components and competing software agents, quality assurance and standard conformance testing through final overall system integration spanning all groups, and exposure to real-world project threats.