IT Systems Development: An IS Curricula Course that Combines Best Practices of Project Management and Software Engineering

Most computing programs still devote little time to software life cycle development, software processes, quality issues, team skills, and other areas of software engineering essential to effective commercial software development. A teaching project was developed and implemented by accommodating knowledge and practices that are applicable to most projects in the area of project management and in the area of software development to Information Systems (IS) students. This approach is relevant to IS model curricula and is in accordance with IS2002.10 project management and practice course guidelines. The rationale behind this approach is to overcome the relative lack of experience of IS students in many aspects of project management and software development by introducing them how to plan, organize, and control software development projects, and to help students strengthen good software engineering practices prior to entering IT industry and become more efficient. We present results of a case study based on a survey conducted in an IT Systems Development course. Survey results show that including topics on project management and Software Engineering best practices lab into an IT Systems Development course helped students (a) deal with non-technical issues of software projects, (b) develop their ability to communicate clearly with team members, and (c) overcome their lack of experience in many aspects of project management and software development.