Infusing Design Thinking into a Software Engineering Capstone Course

Software engineering (SE) educators are challenged to balance the scope and depth in their courses to train students in skills which will fulfill the ever-evolving industry needs. Capstone courses are a tool for educators to transfer hands-on experience into practical knowledge and skills of SE students. This paper describes the design of a Casptone course, at Lappeenranta University of Technology. The designed course is "human-centric SE capstone", infusing design thinking methods and agile practices into the project life-cycle knowhow. The capstone was offered in spring of 2017 as a 16-week course for 29 students. Design thinking was effective to perform requirement elicitation, software design and testing. Also, the applied approach allowed students to be self-directed which increased their motivation, as a result there was zero dropout rate. Design thinking is a powerful mean of problem solving and effectively supports SE education in bringing a more hands-on and minds-on, problem-based curriculum.