Abstract:

This paper describes an innovative teaching project that was developed and implemented by accommodating knowledge and practices that are applicable to most projects in the area of project management and in the area of software development to Information Systems (IS) students. This approach is relevant to IS model curricula and is in accordance with IS2002.10 project management and practice course guidelines. The rationale behind this approach is to overcome the relative lack of experience of IS students in many aspects of project management and software development by introducing to them how to plan, organize, and control software development projects, and to help students strengthen good software engineering practices prior to entering IT industry and become more efficient. We present results of a case study based on a survey conducted to IS Software Engineering (SE) course. Survey results show that including topics on project management and SE best practices lab into an IS SE course helped students (a) deal with non-technical issues of software projects, (b) develop their ability to communicate clearly with team members, and (c) overcome their lack of experience in many aspects of project management and software development.