Applying a Traditional Software Development Process to Drive Projects in Higher Education

As institutions of higher education attempt to professionalize their curricula, we observe the emergence of learning experiences that simulate industrial software projects and stronger focus on the skill set desired by the industry. A common practice to address that need is to introduce a capstone unit where students complete large assignments in teams and consolidate previously acquired concepts and skills. Increasingly, such projects are supported by a given software development methodology in order to familiarize students with these processes and facilitate implementation. While the growing prevalence of Agile methods in the industry is reflected in a proliferation of studies of their use in academic contexts, the application of traditional approaches does not capture much attention in research. This experience report discusses the introduction of a Waterfall model to support student teams developing Artificial Conversational Entities for an industrial client. The course structure and accompanying methods, adaptations of the process, lessons learned and recommendations for academics wishing to use a traditional method as part of a university class are presented. Our study shows that such an approach yields promising results for complex and state-of-the-art projects and practices associated with it enforce students' software-engineering skills.