Reaching Steady State in Software Engineering Project Courses

Project courses provide students with a hands-on experience of software engineering practices in industry and prepare them for their later career. The first weeks of such a course typically involve change and uncertainty and are therefore challenging for students: project teams have to understand requirements that are often unclear, learn to work together and communicate as a team, as well as become accustomed to processes and workflows used in the course. In this paper, we summarize our experiences of how student teams master change at the beginning of a project course to reach a steady state in which the level of uncertainty is manageable. We describe the typical stages of a student project, go into detail on the challenges during the Launch Phase and provide suggestions of how instructors can help students overcome those challenges. We report both on our experience conducting project courses with clients from industry since 2008 and on the results of a qualitative evaluation of one instance of a large multi-project capstone course.