Intra-Curriculum Software Engineering Education

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Computer Science (31)The academic setting of an undergraduate software engineering course imposes fundamental obstacles to the goal of providing students practical experience and skills development. Some major differences between an academic and industrial setting include motivation, amount of available time, and the size and scope of projects. Furthermore, the academic environment requires ensuring a certain level of competency in all students. We accept these differences and are developing a software engineering methodology tailored to the academic setting.One objective of this methodology is to increase the size and scope of the software engineering course project in a way that affords students practical experience in project management and system design without increasing their workload. We also wish to insure an individual level of competency, particularly in the programming skills of lower division students.To achieve these objectives, we are devising a project methodology as the centerpiece of an upper division software engineering course. This methodology is unique in that it will use an intra-curriculum approach involving multiple courses at different levels in the curriculum. The software engineering course will simultaneously cooperating with introductory CS courses, data structures courses, as well as with advanced, specialized elective courses like database, Human Computer Interface, and networks. Software engineering students will focus on design and management activities while the implementation burden is shared with other courses. An automated testing and management system has been developed as part of this project. This system tracks individual skills competency, particularly of lower division students, and assists in coordination between the various courses.