Designing a Multi-disciplinary Software Engineering Project

Software engineering courses often include some form of project, aimed at bridging the theory-practice gap. These projects tend to emphasize technical topics. Because software engineering has an important organizational and social dimension as well, and because software engineering courses may be taken by non-CS majors too, there is every reason to also include these non-technical issues in the software project. In this paper we discuss how we designed a multi-disciplinary software engineering project course that pays attention to non-technical issues. We report about our experience in four editions of the same project, and discuss lessons learned. Our general conclusion is that software engineering projects need to have specific characteristics to attract a multi-disciplinary student population.