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Analyzing Challenges in Software Engineering Capstone Projects

Authors:
Yvonne Sedelmaier
Dieter Landes

Keywords: capstone project; software engineering; challenges; qualitative analysis

Abstract:
Engineering complex software systems is a very delicate and challenging task, which involves a variety of technical, general non-technical, and context-specific non-technical challenges. Getting better insight into the nature of these challenges is of paramount importance for aligning intended learning outcomes and didactical setup in software engineering capstone projects that aim at exercising and extending these competences. In order to obtain a fine-grained understanding of perceived challenges in capstone projects, this work presents results of a qualitative analysis of self-reports which students wrote as post-mortem documents after being part of such a capstone project. As a main contribution, the qualitative analysis substantiates results in earlier work that technical issues tend to be less challenging than non-technical ones, e.g., collaboration within the team and beyond, issues of project management and organisation, and methodological issues related to requirements engineering and effort estimation. In addition, the paper reveals challenges that might have been overlooked so far, e.g., project organisation (and not just planning), individual motivation, and individual deficiencies in setting or adhering to deadlines.

Pages: 135 to 140

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2020

Publication date: October 18, 2020

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4235

ISBN: 978-1-61208-827-3

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from October 18, 2020 to October 22, 2020