Full scale industrial project work, a one semester course

This paper presents the motivations, design, outcomes, and lessons learned from a long series of project-oriented courses. The project is chosen to be similar to real industry projects and with a technical content that is at the senior or master level. The students will in the course follow the project from the initial requirement specification to a product during one semester. The first half of the semester also includes a traditional distributed systems course, but the second half is solely devoted to the project. The time each student is supposed to spend on actual project work is 15 effort weeks which, since the project involves between 15 and 20 students, means that up to 7 effort years are spent on the project by final year computer science students.