Software Engineering Problems Encountered by Capstone Project Teams

Capstone projects are a common part of engineering education. In a capstone project, learning takes place mainly through solving problems during the project. Therefore, understanding what problems the capstone project teams encounter increases understanding on what the students can learn. We collected problems encountered by eleven capstone project teams in a software development project course at Aalto University. Each team used a root cause analysis method twice during their project to identify the problems and their cause-and-effect relationships. The number of identified problems was 103-247 per team. We analysed the problems qualitatively and summarized them under the following four main topics: system functionality, system quality, communication and taking responsibility. The problems created opportunities for learning about software engineering. However, in some teams the problems worsened so much that they created educationally detrimental situations. For example, learning a new programming language from scratch is valuable for a student, but it may start taking too much attention from many other educational aspects of the project. We give suggestions for mitigating the educationally detrimental situations in capstone projects. The suggestions include an iterative development process, team formation practicalities, reasonable project topics, customer education, instructions on selecting and adopting crucial tools, emphasizing learning, and adding control to ensure the use of the desired working practices. Our results help the teachers of similar courses in evaluating the potential that their courses have on reaching specific educational goals and in improving their courses by decreasing educationally detrimental situations.