An industrial software project as a software engineering module at HU Kay Schützler

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 2 Structure of this presentation How the project started Organisation of the project and experience from winter semester 2004/2005 Organisation of the project and experience from summer semester 2005 Future

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 3 How the project started: The first meeting Mr Kirsten (from industry) me Prof. Bothe I need some cheap programmers and future employees... Do you know a good student who is interested in our new project?

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 4 How the project started: The first meeting Mr Kirsten (from industry) me Prof. Bothe Don‘t expect too much of cheap programmers that don‘t know your company! Students are not easy to find, but I‘ve got an idea: A seminar on...

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 5 How the project started: The first meeting Mr Kirsten (from industry) me Prof. Bothe Finally Kay will do something meaningful then... But how to manage... Requirements Engineering! Get them to learn about real life!

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 6 How the project started: The first meeting Mr Kirsten (from industry) me Prof. Bothe Great idea! I could give you a short description of the project by next week Better this way, than no way... Perhaps we could do it like with XCTL: Student projects, Diploma theses,...

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 7 How the project started: The first meeting Mr Kirsten (from industry) me Prof. Bothe

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 8 Original aims of the project Introduction of students to a new domain Practice of requirements analysis methods Involvement in a real-life project Finding out good students Retrieving some interesting topics for diploma theses Establish a longer running cooperation

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 9 Organisation of the project (winter semester 04/05) Meetings every two or three weeks at the institute – Discussing all kinds of issues – Presenting documents from industry and students Two meetings at the company‘s place – Introduction to real life software development circumstances Central web and (later) CVS repository

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 10 Screenshot of project web site (1) Overview Schedule Project: Requirements Engineering for development and production processes

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 11 Screenshot of project web site (2) Project partner Literature

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 12 Project partner: AEG netcontrol “offers services and solutions for energy distribution and supply companies as well as for the industry”

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 13 Experience from project (after winter semester 04/05) Project aims changed significantly Results from three sub projects: – one quite successful, – one quite unsuccessful, – and one far away from good or bad Nevertheless – cooperation considered a success Cooperation continued after joint analysis of project‘s goods and bads

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 14 Change of project aims Initial idea at HU: – Show students real life (but at first only by analysing requirements in a real life environment) Industry: – Showed students real life – unfortunately the hard way – After short and rather incomplete requirements analysis a strong wish for implementation occurred

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 15 Change of project aims Students: – Learned about real life – Tried to implement something – Had not enough stable requirements – Had not as much time as expected – Started a rebellion a few times – Somehow managed their way through

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 16 After this experience: How to proceed? (Proceed at all?) Despite all problems industry showed strong interest in continuing cooperation – Quote: "Only stupid ones make the same mistake more than once. Let‘s try to make some new mistakes next semester!" – Another success: two students from project started practical work (student projects) at the company – Industry donated 5.000,- € to our group

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 17 Organisation of the project (summer semester 05) This time: PURE requirements engineering Weekly meetings with the students – Every first week with the customer for interviews on certain topics (use cases, test cases, non-functional requirements) – Every second week without the customer to discuss students summaries of previous meeting

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 18 Schedule in summer semester 05 Introduction Collecting and discussing use cases Collecting and discussing test cases Summary

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 19 Experience from project (after summer semester 05) Everything went better – Stronger dedication of the project partner – Students felt more comfortable in this more strictly organised form Developed several documents – Put together ideas from each project participant – Each document shows a different aspect of the software to be developed Cooperation considered a greater success

Baile Herculane, Kay Schützler 20 Future Continue cooperation Find some interesting topics for diploma theses Getting more case studies from the industry