A course in software engineering and project management at university level for industrial needs: some reliable results after ten years of experiences

The paper reports on the structure of a two-semester workshop accompanied by lectures on software engineering (SE) methods and on major issues in project management (PM). The course is taught to 300 students per year as part of a master degree curriculum in computer science (CS). During the last ten years the technical content of the course as well as structure, style and schedule have been reviewed regularly in order to achieve a high degree of practical effectiveness. Form and contents of the software engineering labs are described. Teaching project management in parallel with experiencing PM in teamwork is presented as a major factor in tailoring SE education towards practical needs. The authors´ experiences in SE consulting and project management in industrial practice have gradually tuned the course design towards the following priorities. C1: Caution with `latest´ methods. C2: Caution with brand new tools. F1: Focus on (experiencing) roles in SE teams. F2: Focus on work organization on team level. F3: Focus on work organization of the team members on the individual level. F4: Focus on rigid selection of team supervisors