Software Engineering Lab - an Essential Component of a Software Engineering Curriculum

The goal of Software Engineering (SE) education is to teach theory and practice of software sciences, with an ultimate practical goal. Quite surprisingly, although standard SE programs include many hands-on courses, they do not include practical lab courses in software development and maintenance, as common in other engineering disciplines. A capstone project course, that is standard in most SE programs, cannot function as an instructive SE-lab course since it does not enable effective teaching and cannot replace a planned SE development experiment. This paper describes an SE-lab course that creates lab conditions, where students are faced with a deliberately challenging, planned SE development and management tasks, and the course staff provides team-based guidance. The paper analyzes the lab ideals, principles and goals, explains how they are realized in the lab content, and presents its evaluation from the students and the instructors' viewpoints.