Project in applied software engineering

Many schools are meeting a community need by offering a Master's degree for software developers who either did not have an undergraduate major in software development or who had one before the current emphasis on project management techniques was standard. Such a program may also attract students who have had a more recent undergraduate program but who need graduate work to keep up with the field. The author teaches the core two-semester sequence in such a program and has found a strategy that addresses the needs of such a mixed audience. The first semester course described here is designed to be valuable even for a student who does not take the second semester. Although writing intensive, this course has been successfully used in a class that included a number of students for whom English was not a first language.