Teaching software design with open source software

When an introductory course on software design and testing was revised, it was decided to use open source software tools as the major examples and objects of study. The goal was to expose students to realistic software systems and give them experience dealing with large quantities of code written by other people. Using open source software also has the beneficial effect of ensuring that students are aware of the open source software movement, and opens up opportunities to discuss topics such as software piracy and ethics.