Incorporating Real Projects into a Software Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum

Software engineering researchers and practitioners are increasingly more concerned about non-technical issues like user involvement and interaction as a way to improve software development process efficiency. This issue is also present in software engineering education. The IEEE/ACM software engineering guidelines highlights that an undergraduate course in this matter should have a real-world basis. In this paper, we present an undergraduate program that connect students with real-world projects throughout their studies. To evaluate educational results, we performed a survey with 111 students from this software engineering program. The results indicate that students in the end of this program has a much better chance of taking users' desires into consideration instead of focusing on software implementation.