Experience in Teaching a Management-Oriented Capstone Software Engineering Course

Many computer science departments teach a capstone software engineering course involving the design and implementation of a large-scale project. Such a course is normally taught with students working together in teams; consequently, students must face a number of problems related to project management and team dynamics. Our experience has been that students frequently fail to adequately cope with these organizational problems, and consequently fail to complete their projects at an acceptable level of quality. To prepare students to better face these problems, we have modified our capstone software engineering course to provide equal emphasis in both management and technical areas. Our approach to management topics is formal rather than anecdotal, stressing general principles applied to organizational problems arising specifically from situations that occur frequently in technical organizations. This paper reports on the structure of this course, and provides insight into our initial experience in teaching it.