Re-imagining a Course in Software Project Management

It is now common for software engineering programs to include some project management education, typically in the final year of the undergraduate program, or at the postgraduate level. Such courses are challenging for several reasons: faculty are unfamiliar with management education and literature; the software project management literature is dominated by nonempirical, atheoretical, unscientific practitioner recommendations; common software engineering pedagogical approaches are inappropriate for teaching management; and many students seem unwilling or unable to take the course seriously (that is, by attending all classes and completing all assigned readings, activities and projects). This paper describes a postgraduate management course in software engineering, which was iteratively refined over seven years to address all of these problems. Its key features include: 1) scholarly, evidence-based readings; 2) quizzes on readings at the beginning of every class; 3) Brief, slide-free lectures; 4) copious in-class activities formalized into a gradeable workbook; 5) an ambitious, multistage project combining novel research, collaborative data collection and literature reviewing, peer review workshops and individual deliverables. The course embodies both research-led teaching and substantial, novel class-based research.