An industry-academia team-teaching case study for software engineering capstone courses

Abstract

Exposing software engineering students to newest industry practices and latest research and theories allows them to acquire and maintain the technical skills necessary to continually adjust to the rapid changes that occur in technology. Close interaction with industry members help the university and engineering programs identify real-world problems and their solutions and incorporate them into the curriculum. Software engineering capstone projects require the development of major software products and are usually either industry-generated or research-based. They are either assigned for the overall supervision of one instructor or each project is supervised by different instructors independently. In this paper, the authors present a case study in which the software engineering capstone projects have been team-coordinated by two instructors: one full-time faculty and one part-time faculty (full-time industry practitioner), thus combining two complementary sets of skills towards the mentoring of the software engineering students. Two capstone projects (one industry-generated and the other research-based) are also presented with the contribution of each instructor described.