Work in progress — Creating a professional software development environment to support capstone programming projects

Experiential education provides valuable learning opportunities for students in the computing disciplines. Assigning students to work on real-world projects is often seen as a way for students to practice what they have learned in the classroom. While a desirable goal, logistics often make it difficult to provide these types of experiences. However, it is vitally important for students to be exposed to and experiment with tools used in commercial software development environments. This paper provides a descriptive overview of the development and implementation of a professional software development environment used to support computer science capstone programming projects. To date, the environment has been used to support work on a National Science Foundation funded database courseware project that includes over 100 interactive software modules. The environment was built using a collection of open-source applications that provide version control, task assignment and tracking, collaborative team tools, bug tracking, and project documentation management. This project has created a venue for providing consistent high quality real-world types of experiences for students completing their capstone requirement.