A Practical Approach to Align Research with Master's Level Courses

Software Engineering is a discipline in computer sciences that covers different topics ranging from formal methods to practical topics. An essential part of Software Engineering is the organization and the management of software projects. From several studies we know that we master the "craftsmanship", which means coding, but suffer in the organizational topics, i.e. project or process management. Those topics are important to Software Engineering, however, they are rather boring for students, which makes it hard to enthuse them about such topics. During the last years we developed a teaching format that on the one hand covers those high-level and abstract topics and, on the other hand, provides students with the opportunity to have experiences, and lecturers to conduct research. In this paper we present a concept for courses that combines the classic teaching formats lecture, seminar and practical training into a new format that allows for interactive teaching as well as for conducting research. We contribute a blueprint, which can be implemented in further courses. We present experiences made in a first implementation in the area of software process management, and conclude the paper with a discussion and a teaching agenda.