How Does Participating in a Capstone Project with Industrial Customers Affect Student Attitudes?

Teaching of software engineering using capstone projects has seen a steady growth over the years with overwhelmingly positive reported experiences. Discerning what students consider of value before and after a software project course, is crucial for developing a relevant curriculum. This paper reports on the affective learning outcomes of a Scrum based capstone course with industrial clients. We measured affective learning as changes in the attitudes towards the difficulty and importance of certain aspects present in software development, including technical, teamwork and customer interaction. Data was collected from 14 student teams of 7-9 members in the form of team interviews and individual surveys, with 86 students participating in the interviews and 86 valid survey answers. %corresponding to a 66% response rate. Our results show that students largely change their attitudes in the desired direction after the course regarding both importance and difficulty, with 57% reporting an increased understanding of the importance of collaboration and communication within the team and 44% reporting less than expected difficulty in learning new technologies/programming languages.