Workshop 1: Teaching/Learning the Entire Software Development Life Cycle

Teaching/Learning the Entire Software Development Life Cycle - David Klappholz

In a very real sense, so called “soft skills” are more important in software development than is great programming. For example, if the results of a project’s requirements engineering efforts are poor, then even the world’s best programmers will implement useless code which will be extremely expensive to fix; if the results are close to what’s necessary to satisfy the needs of the client, then moderately good programmers will produce code that will be far less expensive to fix. But these aspects of software development can be learned only by doing, that is, by going through the entire software development lifecycle to produce real software that will be used by the client once it has been developed.
Prof. Klappholz has taught both a one-semester junior-level real projects for real clients course (RPRCC) for twelve years and a two-semester senior-level (capstone) RPRCC for five years. Results of the last four years of his capstone RPRCC may be found at http://www.cs.stevens.edu/~david/index.php
He is lead author of a book chapter about RPRCCs.

In the tutorial/workshop Prof. Klappholz will cover the various details involved in organizing and teaching RPRCCs. (He has run tutorials/workshops on this topic at a number of US conferences.)

Expected Outcomes:

Tutorial/workshop participants will be faculty desirous of learning how to develop and teach RPRCCs as well as faculty who have taught RPRCCs and would like to compare notes with others who have and to help beginners.
The former will learn:

1. how to (surprisingly easily) find clients – non-profit organizations, government agencies, university departments and researchers, and early stage startups;
2. how to teach an RPRCC given the backgrounds of their students;
3. how to organize project teams;
4. how to assign roles in project teams; how to tailor software development process to the natures of projects;
5. how to decide on required documentation and weekly deliverables; \

and more.