Students who complete an undergraduate computing degree still must learn too many new tasks and concepts when they join a company that uses modern software engineering practices. We will establish a laboratory to support team projects for two undergraduate software engineering courses for computer science and engineering majors. Exercises and projects based on the lab's software and hardware will allow students to experience development activities that are closer to a realistic industrial experience in these areas: a defined standard software development process, complete with policies, document standards, and reviews; the use of modern development tools, including configuration management and defect tracking tools to help in managing team projects. For our laboratory we will also develop a set of exercises and small projects in other areas of software engineering that will benefit our students and students at other universities. Areas addressed will include rapid prototyping, software testing, formal methods, and process improvement. To establish this laboratory, personal computers, software development tools and other CASE tools are needed. To aid in dissemination of our results, we will make use of software that is commonly available and relatively inexpensive (or free) for universities, including components of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Visual Studio.
