Spanning the gap between software engineering instructor and student

Many computing degrees have a project-based software engineering course where teams of students complete a project under the guidance of the instructor and possibly one or more teaching assistants (TAs). However many instructors are unsure as to how well course objectives for these project-based courses are being met and more importantly, how best to structure the experience to optimize student learning. This paper presents the contrasting views of the instructor and a TA on the learning that occurred in an undergraduate software engineering project course. The undergraduate TA for the course is uniquely qualified to support the course, having had several years of real-world software development experience. This experience allows him to straddle the gap between the typical undergraduate student perspective and the requirements of real-world software development.