Parallel Software Engineering Student Projects

TL;DR: This paper summarizes the experiences with parallel teams of a one-semester software engineering project, and draws conclusions of their advantages and disadvantages.

Abstract: Software engineering education requires a practical course where students can learn processes and practices in a controlled environment. Since software development is usually done in teams, such a course should be a team work course. Due to this, we have a one-semester software engineering project where five to seven st udents form a team. Each team has an assigned customer who needs a software product. Next to traditional one-t eam projects, we have parallel team projects where seve ral teams have the same customer and problem scope. The teams work separately and optimally they do not have any cooperation. Each team has its own product to develop from equal specifications. As a result, the customer gets several products from the same original specification. After three years of parallel projec ts, the resulting software has been unique enough for vario us comparisons. In this paper, we summarize our experiences with parallel teams and draw conclusions of their advantages and disadvantages.