A novel approach to carrying out mini project in Computer Science & Engineering

The student projects done in Computer Science and Engineering suffers from the following problems: poorly managed requirements, poor or no design and poor or no testing. Students generally tend to focus more on coding phase of the project, since the misconception is that a large code constitutes good software. Unlike other branches of engineering, the engineering processes are not visible here. Further, management of large number of student projects poses a challenge in terms of guidance, progress monitoring and assessment. The student projects are observed to be ending up incomplete and are rarely deployed. The feedback from industry side also speaks about the gaps in terms of these skills. A mini project course for fifth semester is designed in the undergraduate programme in Computer Science and Engineering to address the lacunae observed above by tightly integrating it with the theory course on Software engineering. The focus of the mini project is not on what the problem definition is, instead it is on how it is done. The implementation plan addressed the issues and challenges listed above faced by the faculty. Assessment rubrics are written to guarantee proper understanding of the expectations among the stake holders resulting in fair assessment. This approach improved students understandability in Software engineering concepts and also the quality of their capstone projects. The paper discusses the design, implementation and assessment details of mini project along with the experience gained.