Engineering Software Outsouring

The Software Engineering students at the Australian National University showed off their group projects today. These are real projects producing real software for clients from government agencies and companies.

For CEA Technologies Pty Ltd, one team produced a system to manage software components of the radar systems the company builds for the Australian and US military. For The Distillery (a company producing software for the intelligence community to track terrorists) the students provided a system to more easily collect open source information.

Organisations interested in being clients in 2007 can contact Dr Shayne Flint at the ANU.

Third and fourth year students work together. The fourth year students studying project management oversee the projects while the third year ones produce the software.

The clients may also learn something from the proejcts, as the students apply the latest in software engineering methodoligies:

At the commencement of this course, students will be introduced to customers (from industry, government or other university entities)who require a software development project to be undertaken. The typical team size will be 3 to 5 students, the members of which will be required to form/analyse customer requirements and plan (define, estimate, schedule) the project to ultimately deliver and control a software project according to the customer requirements. The implementation part of the project will include monitoring, measuring, tracking, managing change and ultimately close out the project. All teams will be required to produce a minimum set of documents including:

* Software Development Plan (inclusive of other important plans)
* Software Requirements Specification
* Software Design Specification(s)
* Acceptance, System and Integration Test Cases and Procedures
* Source and Binary Code ...

From: Software Engineering Practice (COMP4500), ANU, 2006

While this is a hands on course, some of the text books include:

* The Project Manager's Guide to Software Engineering's Best Practices
* Software Engineering
* Information Technology Project Management: Providing measurable Organizational Value

ps: Next year some of the students may get experience with international outsourcing (offshoring) of software development. The ANU students may be collaborating with students in Indonesia. This came about after I arranged for some of the Indonesian students to undertake software development of a Disaster Management System for Jogjakarta Earthquake. This worked so well I suggested that the ANU and Indonesian students could gain experience in international software development this way.