Putting the practice into software engineering education

The paper describes a subject called Software Engineering Practise, which introduces software engineering concepts to students in a generalist computing degree. The course has three aims: to establish a foundation of good practice which will form the basis for a personal software improvement process in subsequent studies and in professional life; to introduce object oriented design in a context firmly embedded in software engineering; and to give students a taste of working in groups on a reasonably large project. The success of this course is due to the way in which the object oriented design, the software engineering process aspects and the project work so well together to bring the concepts associated with each part of the course to life and to reinforce each other in a relatively realistic context. Other aspects, which contribute to the success of the course, such as the team approach to course management, individual student assessment, and choice of development environment, are also highlighted