A software engineering senior design project inherited from a partially implemented software engineering class project

For a computer science program in which students are required to complete one course in Software Engineering, it is impossible to create a polished finished product for a project of any significant size that can demonstrate all the phases of the project. This can be solved by requiring students to complete a full set of requirements and specifications. Develop design documents for only a subset of the requirements and an even more limited implementation of the design documents. The artifacts from such a class can then be used as the foundation for a senior capstone design course. This allows for the development of skills that are directly needed in the real world, in which a team is given a set of requirements to implement, or is assigned to an existing project to continue its development, or is assigned to a project team that maintains existing code. Anticipated skills developed by the student by such a capstone project are: the ability to read and understand requirements and specifications, the ability to understand preexisting designs and the design decisions that contributed to the design, the ability to understand existing code, the ability to enhance the code to complete a project based on the requirements, and the ability to evaluate preexisting documentation. This paper will describe such a software engineering class project that involved a client from another academic department to develop a non-trivial internet based software application, which supported the department's scheduling of faculty to classes, using an internet based web service to solve the linear programming problem that resulted from the constraints of the problem. The paper will then discuss the subsequent senior design project and implementation that followed.