Hands on software engineering: building a Java software engineering development environment

This paper describes the team and software engineering experiences of a group of undergraduate computer science students doing their final project class before graduation. The project was to build and deliver a Java software engineering development environment The students were organized into teams that had specific assignments to deliver portions of the product. The students established a Web page to track their progress and kept metrics on all of their effort. They defined and followed a software development life cycle. This was the first time these students had worked on a real deliverable product. The results of the semester long class was a bootable system running under Linux that is a complete Java software engineering development environment. It is being used today to drive a Web server and a shared development environment for a consulting organization and their clients. The final delivered cost, including the cost of the CDROM was less than $10.00. This team oriented, product focused class was successful in having the students demonstrate to themselves the value of software engineering disciplines and practices