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DOCUMENT TEMPLATES FOR
STUDENT PROJECTS IN
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Declan Delaney and Stephen Brown
Department of Computer Science,
National University of Ireland, Maynooth
Date: August 2002
Technical Report: NUIM-CS-TR2002-05
Abstract
This technical report outlines the contents of a minimal set of software development
documents, tailored for use by students in software engineering projects, and firmly based on
IEEE standards. The document set is designed to support software development activities. It
provides a framework for use in undergraduate software engineering projects, both individual
and team-based, that helps students to learn best practice. A supplementary report describes the
content of each document in more detail.
1. Background.
Projects form an important part of the education of software engineers. They form an
active method of teaching, as defined by Piaget, leading to a "training in self-discipline and
voluntary effort" [1], which is important to software engineering professionals. Two purposes
served by these projects are: education in professional practice, and outcomes-based
assessment, as identified in the ACM/IEEE Computing Curricula 2001 [2]. An infrastructure
must be provided whereby the students are well guided in their learning, yet have an
opportunity to display their individual achievements for the purposes of assessment. This
corresponds to the ‘integrational’ and ‘differential’ modes of education as described by Cook in
“Educational Measurement” [11].
Software engineering projects, as defined by the IEEE/EIA, consist of a number of
development activities [10]. Each activity is characterised by a set of deliverables, normally in
the form of code or documentation. Providing a structured template for software documentation
assists both the educational and the assessment aspects of a software engineering project. These
templates provide a guide to the expected format and content of the documentation deliverables
based on international