This paper presents experiences with an approach aimed at providing an early introduction to software engineering in a first-year computer science (CS) course, using a software development project. The authors provided most of the specifications and high-level design work, and organized multiple teams into a project that involved coordinated work, testing, and evaluation, as well as realistic code maintenance and integration with the code of other team members.

The results are assessed by students in an opinion survey and more objectively by instructors using direct observations. In both cases, some problems and successes are noted. Specific work organization, the selected problem of library management, the technical approach used (C++ and functional decomposition), and the minimal use of software tools are highlighted as somewhat limiting the potential for the transfer of results (or generalization of conclusions). Nevertheless, because a professional software engineering orientation in introductory programming courses is an important direction, even the limited results from this initial experiment are of interest to educators in CS and related areas.