Improving the Life-Cycle Process in Software Engineering Education

The success of software projects and the resulting software products are highly dependent on the initial stages of the life-cycle process – the inception and elaboration stages. The most critical success factors in improving the outcome of software projects have often been identified as being the requirements negotiation and the initial architecting and planing of the software system. Not surprisingly, this area has thus received strong attention in the research community. It has, however, been hard to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of new or improved concepts because they are often only shown to work in a simplified and hypothesized project environment. Industry, on the other hand, has been cautious in adopting unproven ideas. This has led to a form of deadlock between those parties. In the last two years, we had had the opportunity to observe dozens of software development teams in planing, specifying and building library related, real-world applications. This environment provided us with a unique way of introducing, validating and improving the life cycle process with new principles such as the WinWin approach to software development. This paper summarizes the lessons we have learned.