An interdisciplinary practical approach to teaching the software development life-cycle

A majority of programming courses offered by computer science departments focus on application design and implementation. While this type of programming is useful for the computer science (CS) student, it is not as beneficial to the information technology (IT) student. Students planning to work as IT professionals need a different set of skills than students planning to work in a software developer capacity.An IT discipline-specific perspective should emphasize a practical hands-on approach to install, secure, maintain, and upgrade an organization's portfolio of application programs. In contrast, the traditional CS teaching approaches are geared more at the analysis, design, and implementation of application development. Given this dichotomy, how can instructors' best teach the software development life-cycle (SDLC) process to a class comprised of both IT and CS students? This paper discusses the types of skills needed in the software community and describes a successful teaching approach to teach those skills to a capstone project interdisciplinary class comprised of both IT and CS students.

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