Improving academic software engineering projects: A comparative study of academic and industry projects

A project course in software engineering is often part of the curriculum in computer engineering or computer science. This paper studies the relations hip between academic and industrial projects in software engineering. The p urpose is to compare the practices followed in a project-course approach wi th the practices of professional software engineers. The approach is to com pare the measurements obtained from academic and industrial projects. The c ritical factors regarding the process, the people and the project are discu ssed. The structure of the software processes and the measurement tools are presented. The data analyses show that the academic projects are found to be strongly dominated by programming activities. Based on the data from the industrial projects, we formulate seven recommendations to improve the sof tware engineering practices in academic projects. They are related to manag ement, predevelopment, development, testing, reviews documentation and team activities. The concluding remarks discuss some of the actions that could be taken to improve academic projects.