Software Dev Cycle As Part of CS Curriculum?

tcolvinMI wonders: "I graduated from a small private college a few years ago with a degree in Computer Science. The main focus of the program, at this particular college, was to give you the tools necessary to be able to learn any programming language based on conceptual information, while having been introduced to several popular languages such as VB, C, C++, and Java. However, there was no 'final project' course that introduced a student programmer to the process of software development as a whole. Today, I was talking with a professor and pitched the idea of introducing such a course that would allow students to essentially go through the entire process from design to deployment. Is there any need for such a course? If so, what lessons would you place an emphasis on? So far, my idea is to allow a student to design an application that can be completed within the alloted time frame, develop in an approved language (one they've had and one the professor also knows), go through the QA process and then finally deploy the app to be evaluated by the other students in the class, who have not participated in the project." If you went CS, how well did your lessons prepare you for real project work? If you had a chance to prepare other college students for a career in development, what things would you teach them, and why?

Comments

Some thoughts on the subject

[selil]

As a professor I see much of this has been solved as far as curriculum for Computer Science is concerned. CC2001 & CC2005 here (pdf) layout substantial information on what is required for the CS coursework. There is also the secondary volume for software engineering that lays out the requirements for that field and accreditation. These documents are about the requirements for the core to achieve ABET accreditation of the programs. Each school will implement as they see fit the standards.

To answer your questions about languages my opinion is as follows.

A student needs at least 4 semesters with C++. C++ is the mother language and if you learn it you can program in about any other language for the rest of your life.

A student needs at least two semesters in software architecture and requirements gathering.

A student needs at least 2 semesters of data structures.

A student needs at least 2 semesters of networking.

A student needs at least 2 semesters of operating systems.

A student needs at least 2 semesters in secure software coding (and integral with every other class)

A student needs at least 1 semester in structured scripting like bash, ksh, csh.

A student needs at least 1 semester of compiler theory.

A student needs at least 1 semester of language structure, grammars, syntax, etc...

A student needs at least math theory through discrete mathematics, and better yet through calculus.

These of course are just simple undergraduate courses and there is so much more that can be done beyond this.