Teaching Evolution of Open-Source Projects in Software Engineering Courses

In the traditional software engineering courses, the students develop small programs from scratch. This does not correspond to industry practice where programmers spend most of their time evolving medium to large systems. In order to narrow this gap, we developed a course where students practice software evolution through the implementation of change requests on medium-sized open-source software systems. The results of the course show that this type of software engineering course gives students a more realistic experience than traditional software engineering courses. In the survey at the end of the course, the students expressed a higher level of satisfaction with both rating the course and assessing how much they learned. Additionally, the resources required by such a course are not excessive. 1