Much of modern software engineering centres on large development projects. Such projects require many engineers, working in collaboration, to achieve success; it’s rarely the case that software engineers work alone on isolated tasks. To better prepare our students for their future careers, we emphasize team-based project work throughout the Software Engineering programme. Many of our courses feature group projects and, in the 2nd and 3rd years of the programme, two full-year projects provide first-hand experience of collaborative software development on a larger scale.

The Software Engineering Project is the largest of the projects that students undertake during their studies. It spans the entire final year of the programme and challenges students to apply their skills and knowledge to create a significant software application. Students work to complete end-to-end development of a software product, taking it from an initial concept through to final delivery and deployment. A defining characteristic of the project is that it is not the sort of artificial exercise so often seen in University programmes; it is an instance of real software development, with real-world clients, customers, and end-users. On completion, the software will go into actual production.

The following projects were completed by Software Engineering Project teams in 2003: