What Clients Want - What Students Do: Reflections on Ten Years of Sponsored Senior Design Projects

Undergraduate computer science degree programs often provide an opportunity for students to experience real software projects as a part of their programs of study. These experiences frequently reside in a course in which students form software development teams, are assigned to a project offered by a corporate sponsor and devote one or two semesters to the task of making progress on the project. In an ideal model, faculty mentor student teams who, in turn, behave as sub-contractors or consultants to the sponsor. Students work for a grade, not directly for the sponsor as a true sub-contractor would. In the ideal model, students demonstrate what they have learned about software engineering process, as well as their ability to implement programmed solutions. Student teams provide progress reports, both oral and written, and directly experience many of the challenges and successes of true software engineering professionals. This paper reports on one such program after 10 years of operation. The technologies and software development processes of interest to sponsors are summarized and presented as an informal survey. Student response is discussed in terms of software systems they produced and how they went about producing them. The maturation of these students as software engineering professionals is also discussed