Integrating Open Source Software into software engineering curriculum: Challenges in selecting projects

Software Engineering (SE) projects that emphasize maintenance and evolution can emulate industrial challenges and prepare students for careers in the software industry. Designing maintenance-centric SE projects, however, is difficult because software code upon which these projects must be based is not readily available. Open Source Software (OSS) can alleviate this issue by offering a rich and varied volume of code. This rich diversity of OSS projects, however, presents the greatest hurdle in seamlessly selecting suitable projects for integration. To better understand the scope of this diversity, initially, we propose to manually select uniformly difficult projects of appropriate complexity. Ultimately, based on the experiences and insights acquired through the manual selection, we envision the development of a systematic methodology based on software metrics to ease the project selection process. Such a systematic methodology will pave the way for the adoption of the OSS-based approach at peer institutions, bringing us a step closer to injecting realism into SE projects.