Projects

We hope that the main selling point for the SE specialization over the traditional CS curriculum will be the practical project-oriented curriculum in which students work with real organizations. The typical CSIM SE student will work on three medium- to large-sized software development projects:

1. The first project is the medium-sized Web Application Engineering project. Student groups in the class will be encouraged to find a local NGO or charity organization to work with. This will give them the opportunity to do meaningful work helpful to society and the SE Asian region while developing essential teamwork and technical skills.

2. The second project is the larger Open Source development project. Students will plan their project in groups as part of the requirements for the ISDM and Software Architecture Design courses. The implementation part of the project will be the main purpose of Software Systems Development and Quality Improvement, during the summer session of their first year. The specific details of the project are up to the students, subject to the approval of the instructors and the constraint that it involve a new open source initiative or a significant contribution to an existing open source initiative. Students will be encouraged to join projects with the potential for positive impact in developing nations. The two-month Software Systems Development and Quality Improvement summer session will be an intensive period in which the students will work full time to accomplish the goals set out in their project plan. We hope that after this effort the students will not only have direct experience with the emerging distributed software development model and have made a positive contribution to the open-source community, but will also be well-prepared to work directly with industrial partners on enterprise applications.

3. The third project in the SE specialization will be the student's Master's thesis or research study. This will be an individual project (the Web Application and Open Source projects are group projects). In the preferred model, students will do their thesis during an internship with a local industrial client. They will design and implement a software system useful in the client's enterprise. The system can be commercial or non-commercial, and proprietary or open, subject to the agreement of the student, company, and thesis supervisor, so long as documentation of the project in a Master's thesis and/or research paper is allowed. Students that are unable or unwilling to find a corporate partner may instead choose to work on an AIT faculty member's research project, so long as the project is primarily a software engineering effort.

The project-oriented curriculum makes our program especially attractive for software development companies interested in improving their employees' software engineering skills. It would be possible for a local corporation to fund an employee to enter our program, take courses for one year, then return as an intern to do a thesis in consultation with the CSIM thesis supervisor. The internship model for the thesis will have the additional benefit of strengthening CSIM faculty members' contacts with local software companies and IT organizations.