Key Software Engineering Concepts for Project Success: The Use of "Boot Camp" to Establish Successful Software Projects

The use of project initiation techniques is not new to academia or industry. While successfully using "real world" projects to educate software engineers, the master of software engineering (MSE) program at Carnegie Mellon University has learned some key concepts and topics that make software project initiation more successful. We have found that project success is linked to issues surrounding how teams are formed and the specific guidance that they are initially provided. The MSE program uses a concept we call "boot camp" that focuses on some key areas of Software Process issues and Human Communication.