Combining software engineering education and empirical research via instrumented real-client team project courses

Real-client, team project courses provide excellent opportunities for performing empirical research in software engineering (SE). Compared to empirical research on large, multi-year SE projects, a course with several team projects per year is the SE research equivalent of the fruit fly in species evolution research. Although their predictive power for large-project SE is more suggestive than definitive, the research results generally provide useful contributions to human knowledge in the SE area.