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Open source contribution as an effective software engineering class project

Published: 27 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Software engineering courses often include a semester project designed to give students experience with real-world programming challenges and to expose them to phases of the software development cycle not covered in other classes. One means of engaging students in realistic programming challenges is to make participation in open source development a part of the semester project.
This paper describes an assignment in which students contribute to an open source project. The project is designed to immerse students in the open source community and expose them to the work flow and design strategies of a large project. Students work in small groups and decide both which open source community to contribute to and which specific contributions they will make. They can choose to focus on implementation of new features over software maintenance or can focus on documentation and design over both. The assignment contains a proposal phase that allows the instructor to ensure that students are exposed to a healthy cross section of the development cycle.

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H. J. C. Ellis, R. A. Morelli, T. R. d. Lanerolle, and G. W. Hislop. Holistic software engineering education based on a humanitarian open source project. In Proceedings of the Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training, pages 327--335. IEEE Computer Society, 2007.
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R. Morelli, T. de Lanerolle, and G. W. Hislop. Foss 101: Engaging introductory students in the open source movement. In Proceedings of the Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education, SIGCSE '09, pages 311--315, 2009.
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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE '11: Proceedings of the 16th annual joint conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
June 2011
418 pages
ISBN:9781450306973
DOI:10.1145/1999747
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 27 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. open source
  2. real-world projects
  3. software engineering
  4. software maintenance
  5. team programming

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