15-413 Software Engineering Practicum - Potential Client Page


Welcome!  15-413 is a software engineering project course at Carnegie Mellon University.  You may have been referred to this page as a potential open source client for a 15-413 student team.

We have asked each team to identify a person within an open-source organization to act as a "client" for the team.  This promotes the learning goals of the course by helping students get integrated into the project in a way that they can make a real difference, and giving them an opportunity to practice client negotiation and requirements gathering skills.  We hope that this relationship will enable them to make a stronger contribution to the open source project as well.

Here's the deal.  If you are willing to volunteer as a client, you can expect a 2-4 person student team to work with you for the semester period, between now and the end of April 2010.  Their time commitment is about 12 hours per person per week; perhaps 8-9 hours of that will be spent on the project itself, with some additional time for meeting in class and fulfilling the (small) assignments and documentation requirements for the course.  So you can expect the team to contribute perhaps 200-400 person hours, or the equivalent of a half-time engineer, to your project.  What we ask from you is to commit to be available via email, Skype, or chat once a week to go over the students' progress and give them feedback on what needs to be done.  We also ask that you provide feedback to me twice during the semester on their work and their interactions with you--this will make up 1/3 of their grade, so they should be motivated to keep their client happy.

More information about the course is available at the main course web page.  We are working with some open source clients for the first time this semester, and so we would also value any feedback you have for how this course can interact more productively with open source projects.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any other questions.  Thank you for considering a contribution to our course--I hope you will also find our students' contributions valuable to your project!

Jonathan Aldrich, Instructor