Best practices for industry-sponsored CS capstone courses

Most undergraduate computer science programs culminate in a mandatory capstone course. These courses provide learners with an opportunity to apply the concepts they have learned to a life sized non-trivial software development project. Having external corporations provide project assignments and act as a client to a team of students is an excellent way to increase the capstone experience's fidelity to software development as it is practiced in an industry setting. This experience report takes a fresh look at industry-sponsored CS capstone projects. We will detail how our capstone course has successfully adopted a hybrid approach, in which students are either assigned a project sponsored by an industry partner, or optionally form their own team and pitch a proposal as a startup project. We conclude with a discussion of the lessons we have learned along the way.