A project-intensive software design course

A two-semester undergraduate software engineering course sequenee is taught at Fort Lewis College. The first course in the sequence (Systems Analysis) serves as an introduction to the software engineering disciplines of Software Project Management, Software Quality Assurance and Software Configuration Management. The seecmd course (Systems Design and Implementation) is a projeetintensive software design muse that emphasizes the design, implementation, testing and maintenance phases of the life cycle and provides students with hands-on experience in the software engineering disciplines. The first course emphasizes software engineering terminology and ‘theoty’ through the ‘lecture and readings’ format. The second course emphasizes software engineering practice through the course project format. Teams of student analysts produce a requirements specification document in the Systems Analysis course. Teams of student designers, implementers, testers and quality assurance personnel implement the system based upon these documents in the Systems Design course. This article describes the unique features of the sot%vare design course and the author’s experiences with using a projeet-intensive course model for that course.