A Groupware Laboratory for Software Engineering Education

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Until recently, students could be introduced to the relevant concepts of software engineering environments by simply placing a variety of these tools on various computers and requiring students to build software with them. Now the nearly universal practice of industry is toward the use of groupware tools that allow and control the sharing of software artifacts among large teams spread over time and space. This project outfits such a groupware laboratory to support medium- to large-scale distributed software development. This environment cannot be emulated by students on their home computers; nor can the department's computer laboratory be configured for this use because of the emphasis on remote accessibility of artifacts through the use of centralized software. The integration of groupware activities into software engineering programs is particularly important for small, urban colleges and universities that are located in the same city as the employers of their students. These programs are rewarded for maintaining parity with industry practices and run great risks in credibility if the instructional program is observed to be seriously out of step with the practice of local industry. In these same urban settings, students are often nonresidential, and therefore they will greatly appreciate a distributed instructional environment that allows them to meet and work electronically. The very software tools that are to be assessed for their productivity in industry solve the scheduling impediment that has discouraged academic programs from large team exercises. Through the groupware laboratory, students experience the convenience as well as the power of distributed software development environments. *