Conference Session

SE Curriculum and Course Management

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Richard Stansbury, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; Massood Towhidnejad, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

performance. This approach isevaluated versus the previous, a more highly subjective, assessment approach for this course.The paper concludes with a discussion of how this process will be implemented for later years.Introduction:At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), Daytona Beach campus, two courses, CEC420/421: Computer System Design Lab and SE 450/451: Software Team Project, comprise thetwo halves of a single year-long capstone course provided by the Department of Computer andSoftware Engineering. There is typically a significantly higher number of software engineeringstudents versus computer engineering students. The course also invites participants from otherdepartments such as human factors in order to encourage a multidisciplinary

Conference Session

Software Engineering Teaching Techniques

Collection

2009 Annual Conference & Exposition

Authors

Clifton Kussmaul, Muhlenberg College

Tagged Divisions

Software Engineering Constituent Committee

varied user community, which demonstrates the role and value of communicationand supporting tools, such as discussion forums, version control, and task or defect trackingsystems. Third, students may already be familiar with FOSS as users.Faculty can help students by using a five step “USABL” model in which students use FOSSprojects, study the project as a worked example, add minor enhancements, build largercomponents, and finally leverage FOSS for other purposes. This paper describes experiencesusing FOSS and this approach across a computer science (CS) curriculum and particularly in asophomore-level SE course and in capstone software projects. First, it briefly reviews SE courseand project design, and FOSS. Second, it describes the five step