Using Software Project Courses to Integrate Education and Research: An Experience Report

At University of Southern California (USC), CSCI577ab is a graduate software engineering course that teaches best software engineering practices and allows students to apply the learned knowledge in developing real-client projects. The class is used as an experimental test-bed to deploy various research tools and approaches for validation of new methods and tools. Various research data have been collected as partial basis for twelve PhD dissertations. This paper reports how research and education are integrated via project experiments and how the results strengthen future educational experiences.