Concurrent Software Engineering Project

Concurrent engineering or overlapping activities is a business strategy for schedule compression on large development projects. Design parameters and tasks from every aspect of a product's development process and their interdependencies are overlapped and worked on in parallel. Concurrent engineering suffers from negative effects such as excessive rework and increased social and communication complexity that negatively affect gains. In the university environment, however, these difficulties and negative effects, if controlled, can help in promoting our educational goals such that they should be exploited rather than avoided. Although linear (i.e., waterfall) has been the most often used model in teaching, time constraints and an opportunity-driven learning process should make the concurrent model suitable for student projects. This paper elaborates on these ideas and reports on our students' experience.