Practice What You Preach - Building a Capstone Management System as Undergraduate IT Capstone Projects

While a capstone experience is an important part of the IT curriculum, effectively managing a large number of projects can be a challenging task for a capstone instructor. This paper describes the authors' approach in building a capstone management system as a list of student projects for an undergraduate capstone class. The authors first describe the capstone process and then present the design considerations and each component in detail. Feedback and comments from capstone instructors, industry sponsors, as well as students are also discussed. The lessons learned from this endeavor may inspire other capstone instructors in the IT field or the general computing discipline to build similar systems to manage their capstone projects while avoiding some of the pitfalls that the authors encountered.