What Can Students Get from a Software Engineering Capstone Course?

For the last ten years we have been teaching a capstone course for fifth year students of the Computer Science Department of the Universidad de Chile. Five year ago we redesigned the course, shifting from projects following a waterfall process and focused on technical aspects, to one centered in soft skills following agile practices. Since then, we provide out students a concrete learning outcome: to internalize how relevant is having and developing critical soft skills to succeed in projects. Last year, we wondered whether our students were actually getting what we declared. We conducted a survey on students' initial and final perception about the relative value and difficulty of different dimensions involved in their projects: technical challenge, teamwork, planning, and negotiation with the client. Also, we applied a one-tailed dependent pair sample t-test to determine the statistical significance of the surveys result. We found out that the relative value of soft skills grows while that of the technical challenge drops, and that the students find that planning and teamwork are harder than they expected. Also, we found statistically significant evidence that, for the soft skills we have measured, the perceived relative relevance actually changes throughout the course.