Work in Progress: One Approach to Software Engineering Project Selection for Small Student Populations

Software Engineering is a discipline that by its nature expects students to engage in group work. Our Software Engineering program culminates with a senior project course that is intended to provide students with an opportunity to see a software project through one or more increments that can be delivered to the customer. In addition, it is desirable for students to gain real world experience working in a group on a software project for a real customer. Ideally, groups will consist of 3 to 5 students in the senior project course, however, since our program is small, we may have fewer than 3 students enrolled in the course during any given offering. The goal of this work is to find a sustainable method of providing students with opportunities to work on group projects for outside entities, even when the enrollment in the capstone course precludes forming groups of the desired size. Our initial investigation is evaluating the effectiveness of utilizing socialcoder.org as a source for student projects. socialcoder.org is a website that seeks to match volunteer developers with projects for non-profit organizations7. By utilizing socialcoder.org, we provide an opportunity for students to work in a team that includes individuals from outside the institution. Students also have an opportunity to work with a real customer and engage in a service learning project consistent with the university’s mission. This work examines two trials. The first trial had a single student participant and was quite successful. The second trial had 4 students participate, but had mixed results.