Supporting a software engineering course with Lotus Notes

Managing an undergraduate single-project software engineering course with 40 to 70 students is quite challenging. Many instructors are still not teaching this type of course, because of its high demand of time and involvement. In this paper we show how we have automated three of the most time-consuming processes associated with single-project courses: project registration, team assignment and review of documents. We describe the design issues and an implementation based on Domino, the Lotus Notes solution for the Web. We implemented our system in an undergraduate software engineering project course at Carnegie-Mellon University and found that the electronic processes provide major time savings when compared with traditional mechanisms based on paper. We believe that these savings will make single-project courses more teachable by a wider range of instructors.