Crafting a software engineering capston project course

When properly constructed, a project-based capstone software engineering course can provide the challenging, but essential bridge from academic computing to the world of professional software development while fostering critical teamwork, leadership, and communications skills. In this work, we discuss experiences with five distinct student projects that involved heterogeneous teams, both systems and software engineering disciplines, industrial partnerships, component-based in addition to traditional development methodologies, and interactions with "real" customers. The heterogeneous teams included computer science, systems engineering, and systems engineering management majors and ranged in size from five to nine students. The projects included a protocol for file transfers between ground stations and on-orbit satellites, a satellite telemetry archiving and visualization tool, porting and extending an evolutionary algorithm for runway damage optimization, an unmanned aerial vehicle situational awareness capability, and a pedagogical interactive game for learning the concepts and applications of public key infrastructures. Partnership with an aerospace industry corporation exposed our students to Capability Maturity Model (CMM) Level 3 processes and facilitated enriching professional mentorships while stimulating student motivation and ownership of their efforts. The structure of the course afforded students significant autonomy to develop and explore both their interpersonal communication skills as well as the tenets of effective project management including scheduling, project tracking, and risk management. In addition, each project was specifically selected to offer the teams the opportunity to develop a useful deliverable with potential for use beyond this pedagogical setting. The result was a high-energy, dynamic, and demanding learning experience with plenty of lessons and opportunities for improvement by the instructor as well as the student.