Utilizing open source software in teaching practice-based software engineering courses

Software engineering courses face the challenge of covering all the stages of analysis, development, maintenance, and support while addressing practical issues such as dealing with large codebase. Free and open source software (FOSS) and more specifically humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS) have been used by many educators to bring many add-ons to computer science education such as innovation and motivation. In addition, FOSS/HFOSS could give a better understanding of real world projects to students. In this work, we are looking at some activities developed for teaching upper division undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses using open source software projects and analyze the impacts of using this approach on students.