It is often observed that a difficult aspect of teaching software engineering is getting students to appreciate the difference in scale between software written as exercises in programming classes and software that professional developers produce. Many of the rules of good practice only make sense in the context of software on a scale much greater than students will have experienced, so when introduced in a classroom setting, they are too easily dismissed as complex and unnecessary.

This leads to suggestions that students should be exposed to real commercial software as part of their education. The rise of open-source software gives an alternative that may be more easily arranged: students are asked to volunteer as contributors to free/libre open-source software (FLOSS) projects (the FLOSS term avoids taking sides in an ongoing debate on terminology). This paper discusses the experience of using this approach in one particular module.

The paper says enough to convince readers that this can work as a satisfactory part of students’ educations, though it is rather lacking in detail on what students were able to achieve through their involvement and how it could be fairly assessed.

I was disappointed to read that most students in this case chose roles in testing and requirements engineering. It seemed to me this may have been a way of sidelining them, perhaps because such projects prefer more experienced contributors. It would still be a useful learning experience, but, in my opinion, less so than actual engagement in writing code.