Learning Information Systems Engineering and Its Management from Experience of a Tiny Project through University-Industry Collaboration

We have developed a training course where both undergraduate students and engineers in industry collaboratively learn a construction of information systems through project-based learning. The project is composed of two to four students and a project manager from an IT company. They try to develop a tiny information system for real clients and users. Through this project, students develop communication skills to acquire the client´s requirements. They are able to learn from several different companies´ philosophies and engineering methodologies by observing multiple projects. Project managers from the IT industry can experience the difficulty of project management such as clarifying the project scope, balancing between delivery and quality, and problem- finding/solving in the project. Our experience showed that although projects are very small in scale, common problems that are similar to actual large-scale projects occurred, due to the students´ lack of skills.