Practice Based Studio

Carnegie Mellon University's Masters of Software Engineering Program is 25 years old. During this time the program has undergone numerous changes, revisions, and additional software engineering programs have been added to the original program. Today, we have a suite of software engineering programs targeted at different software engineering domains and educational needs. The hallmark of all of our software engineering programs through all these years has been the project course. The project course provides an environment where students can apply core and elective course concepts and principles in a team-oriented, real-world context with industry customers. The student teams are self-directed with coaching from mentors. There are two key challenges that we have faced over the years with project courses. The first is providing the right level guidance for student teams to get started, form teams, and instantiate processes without over or under prescribing how teams should go about this. The second is how to evaluate team-oriented project work in a fair, transparent, and consistent way. In this paper, I will describe Practice Based Studio which is a framework that we have developed to evaluate, measure, and grade team progress and performance in multi-semester, project based courses.