Practical graduate software engineering projects: can something useful be built in one semester?

First year software engineering graduate students are required to take a Survey in Software Engineering course as a pre-requisite to all other graduate level studies at Southwest Texas. Along with covering the software engineering body of knowledge, students form in teams to work on a case study or project. During the fall semester of 2001, the author presented the students with a real world problem of building a web site for one of the other university colleges. To spread out the learning experience, this professor also had a graduate software engineering quality class running concurrently. That class became the software quality assurance and test teams for the first year students. A master´s program in software engineering should not be looked on as a stepping-stone to a PhD. It has to be a real-world experience with building a product for real customers. These students, 29 in the survey and 19 in the quality courses, had a high percentage of adult learners and two with PhDs in unrelated fields. 50% had worked in programming related jobs but none had been on a product team that actually delivered an end product. At the onset the requirements could not have been simpler - build a web site for an associate dean who knew exactly what he wanted. The end result was far from simple with the customer changing requirements up to finals´ week. There were many learning opportunities for both classes. This paper describes the learning environment, the problem presented, lessons learned, and effort expended. It compares the efforts and results to other software engineering student semester projects. Based on the author´s experience, a framework and selection criteria for the types of software engineering projects that can successfully be completed in one semester are presented.