Pioneering entrepreneurial software engineers

Abstract

The majority of undergraduate software engineering courses are taught by presenting theoretical background, reinforced by group or individual work on in-class projects. However, exposure to real-world projects would greatly improve a student's performance in industry. So far, attempts at involving students in real-world projects have been focused on large software products. This approach almost never succeeds in producing a final workable product because of the short period and provides little satisfaction to the customer or to the students. Hence, a fundamental question arises: can we develop a one-semester undergraduate software engineering course where we teach software engineering concepts and methodologies, and at the same time, have each student experience every software engineering phase, work in teams on a real-world project, interact with a real-world customer, and develop a marketable product which can be used, as is, by the customer? In this paper, we answer this question in the affirmative by presenting a novel approach for teaching software engineering to undergraduates