Bringing Realistic Software Engineering Assignments to the Software Engineering Classroom

Effective, professional quality work is essential for success in many fields of endeavor, yet software engineering students often gain, at best, a limited and cursory level of expertise through their normal curricula. In particular, students often fall short in the areas of communication and project tracking. This paper discusses an approach that has proved successful in two graduate level software engineering courses. The approach requires them to produce professional grade documents and to use earned value management techniques for keeping track of their work. Two key elements of the approach are to set an expectation for professional grade student work products and to provide opportunities for the student to produce drafts that are rigorously reviewed