Applied software engineering education

If we are to consider evaluating the available workforce under the spectrums of time, cost, and reliability, the theoretical teaching of software engineering fundamentals is not sufficient to provide the skills and knowledge expectations of the employers. Besides the specialized knowledge, the non-technical skills such as the communication ability within the group for partitioning, assigning, and monitoring task progress are required as part of the background. However, these skills are generally omitted while teaching software engineering due to lack of time, environment, and/or resources. Since traditional lectures are lacking of practical ways of creating software, the focus of this research is to present our experiments during a client-sponsored project in an applied classroom environment at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). Our goal is to provide not only the differences between the theoretical and practical education, but also the impact of a real client and the vital considerations and conditions taken by the development team in order to prevent failure in the project are expressed. Finally, to measure the outcome of the applied teaching and conduct future enhancements, a pre and post-knowledge assessment were conducted.