Ensuring capstone project success for a diverse student body

The need for instilling the discipline of software engineering in today's CS students increases along with the growth in variety and complexity of large-scale and legacy software systems. To meet this need, CS departments increasingly augment their traditional course offerings with senior-year capstone projects (frequently sponsored by industry), thus exposing students to the 'real-world' of software engineering. But difficulties arise when CS programs must accommodate an academically and otherwise background-diverse student body, especially when several degree options exist within the major. How can a department best ensure that each student assigned to a project has the necessary background and skills to contribute towards a successful conclusion of the project when project variety and scope can differ significantly? In this paper, we summarize our approach: a set of prerequisite project 'gateway' courses, along with the use of guidelines for course content and assessment so that a high level of consistency is maintained in the way gateway courses are taught.