Capstone Project: From Software Engineering to “Informatics”

This paper reports on experiences in transitioning a capstone course from a single-quarter to three-quarters. A single-quarter project course in software design and development had been offered by our department for over twenty years. More recently, upon formation of a new undergraduate degree in Informatics, this course was transformed into a three-quarter capstone course taken by students in their final year. Correspondingly, some aspects of the course projects, such as the business scope and software complexity, grew in proportion to the increase in the project duration. At the same time, a number of ¿costs¿ were reduced, including the time and effort required to set up the development infrastructure and development environments, and learn new tools and languages. Most importantly, several other factors experienced substantial growth. The longer project duration allowed significant increase in the effort and attention paid to usability engineering and user-centered design, leading to systems that were deployable and more usable for the target users. It also enabled better software testing, deployment and release management. As a result, the final outcome was much closer to production quality than the prototypes and proof-of-concept systems typical of earlier single-quarter projects.