Introducing a “Street Fair” Open source Practice Within Project Based Software Engineering Courses

Columbia University and USC, as well as many other universities, have software engineering courses where students work in small teams to develop a product of moderate complexity. Typically such efforts are “closed source” where teams do not (or are forbidden) from sharing information and providing assistance to other teams. There are certainly many justifiable reasons for this such as grading uniformity. Yet strong drivers such as grade competition, generally thought to promote quality results (i.e. successful projects), often do not. The authors ran an experiment introducing a style of open source practice called “street fair” with surprisingly positive results.