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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:
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To provide training to IT/CS
students keeping in view the requirements of their prospective
employers (i.e. the software industry).
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To allow students to learn good
programming practices by reading professionally written
high-quality code and by getting feedback from professionals.
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To address (and try to resolve) the
issue of the scarcity of quality CS/SE faculty in most of the
universities.
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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.
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