Improving the Success Rate of Student Software Projects through Developing Effort Estimation Practices

Software projects have become an integral part of undergraduate and graduate engineering programs at technical universities. This trend in engineering education is driven by the increasingly usage of computer technology in almost every aspect of daily life. Based on the teaching experience in the last few years, it has been found out, that a surprising number of software related projects conducted by students at technical universities had been delivered late. Such situations usually stand for lower rating for the project, retest, or even prevent being promoted to the next study level. The result of the analysis has shown that lack of effort estimation or inaccurate estimation can be considered as the main reasons preventing successful and on-time project completion. In the paper, a course is proposed that covers required topics for understanding effort estimation concept. The majority of the course is based on the case studies of software engineering practices. The course is completed by a teacher guide to manage student software projects.