Teaching software design with social engagement

Software designers constantly mediate with various stakeholders, agree with requirement engineers and interact with coders. Software design is a socially-intensive activity. Teaching software design should be equally socially-intensive. However academic courses still lack a beneficial balance between theory, practice and social engagement. This paper provides details on how we address this problem in our course on software design. The course is designed to engage students with real-life projects and using peer-review sessions within collaborative team clusters. These instruments embed the social conditions of software design within the students´ learning process. We show the effectiveness of the course by discussing student evaluations.