Teaching distributed software engineering with UCOSP: the undergraduate capstone open-source project

Software engineering courses in computer-science departments are meant to prepare students for the practice of designing, developing, understanding and maintaining software in the real world. The effectiveness of these courses have potentially a tremendous impact on the software industry, since it is through these courses that students must learn the state-of-the-art process and the tools of their eventual "trade", so that they can bring this knowledge to their job and thus advance the actual state of practice. The value of "learning software engineering" through project-based courses has long been recognized by educators and practitioners alike. In this paper, we discuss our experience with a distributed project-based course, which infuses the students' learning experience with an increased degree of realism, which, we believe, further improves the quality of their learning and advances their readiness to join the profession.