National ICT R&D Fund

Technical R&D Projects

Funded Projects

Integration of Open Source Software Projects in IT Education

Principal Investigator:
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NU-FAST), Lahore. www.nu.edu.pk
Project Directors:
Dr. Fakhar ul Islam Lodhi	fakhar.lodhi@nu.edu.pk
Dr. Naveed Akhtar Malik	rector@vu.edu.pk
Dr. Muhammad Murtaza Yousuf	murtaza@pucit.edu.pk
Project Details:
Start Date: November, 2007	Duration: 30 months
Project Cost: PKR 37.6 million	Project Funding: PKR 37.6 million
Project Status: In progress.
Technical Progress Report: Q1 - Q2 reports submitted.
Financial Audit Report: Pending.
Project URL: http://www.serc.org.pk/projects.html Orange HRM Blog
Detailed proposal is available here.

Executive Summary

Education in Software Engineering aims at preparing the students for their utilization in the software industry. This requires equipping them with skills and knowledge necessary for developing industrial strength software. This could ideally be achieved by involving the students in realistic projects. Several attempts have been made to emulate such real life scenario in the classroom environment. However, unavailability of such projects in large number on a continuous basis has resulted in experiments which could not be repeated on large scale, if at all. This project focuses on the participation of students in developing open source software, which has emerged as a mainstream activity over the last 10 years, and can help in achieving the objectives of practical software engineering.

Open source software development is a very well coordinated and properly engineered practice on a larger scale. Typically, an individual or a small group of people start work on a project. After reaching a certain maturity level, the project is floated as open-source and volunteers are invited to participate in the development effort. The community of users/volunteers participates in its development if it finds the project interesting. This project proposes adopting the same approach in order to make the final year projects of students properly engineered on the basis of software engineering. The key objectives of this technical project are:

To provide training to IT/CS students keeping in view the requirements of their prospective employers (i.e. the software industry).
To allow students to learn good programming practices by reading professionally written high-quality code and by getting feedback from professionals.
To address (and try to resolve) the issue of the scarcity of quality CS/SE faculty in most of the universities.
To help software industry by providing them with the workforce that has worked on industrial strength projects, thus reducing the costs of training programs required for new inductees.