Risks in Students' Software Projects

Software project education is an important part of software engineering studies in all universities. A well written final report gives an overview how the project went and what students have learned from the project. In this paper we analyze risks in 76 final reports from students' software projects,from academic years 2006-7 and 2007-8. The projects were done in two Finnish universities. We recognized that four major risks are tools and skills to use the tools (61% of projects), technological problems (53%), scheduling problems (61%) and working or studying too many other courses during the project (45%). We also give guidelines to teachers and project managers to take into account the special nature of student projects.