Implementation of practical exercises in software engineering education to improve the acquirement of functional and non-functional competences: A field report about project-based learning in software engineering

Software Engineering is a very volatile profession that requires a variety of theoretical as well as practical skills. In addition to expertise technical knowledge, graduates have to have a variety of social, methodical and personal competences. The acquirement of these non-functional competences are getting more and more important for a successful software engineer. To fulfill these requirements, it is necessarily important to prepare future professionals already during their college course of education. This paper presents exercises for a software engineering lecture with the goal to strengthen the students´ practical experiences and to support the development of their non-functional competences. The developed exercises impart technical knowledge and encourage the students to improve their self-organized and lifelong learning. Thereby they are facing practical issues in all steps of the software engineering process while working on an inter semester project.