Computer science capstone course senior projects: from project idea to prototype implementation

This paper gives an overview of a capstone course, CS426-Senior Projects, and focuses on the streamlined software engineering process followed to take student projects from initial concept to prototype implementation. The paper provides details on course structure, pointers to students´ work, and observations on applying various educational tools. It also presents details on the software process designed and followed in CS426 to support high quality project development in the short timeframe of an academic semester. A discussion of criteria used for deciding on project phases, activities and artifacts, together with an analysis on how this shorter, streamlined development process could be applied to other engineering courses is included. The number of publications and other accomplishments that resulted from CS426 student projects are also reported. Furthermore, we compare our approach to this capstone course with others, and include a summary of planned enhancements to the course´s content, delivery, and outcomes