Improving practical software engineering teaching with industrial mentoring of open source team projects

Employers often remark that Computer Science graduates do not have the right skills to work on modern software engineering projects where agile practices, continuous integration, test-driven development, git workflows and regular code reviews are commonplace. To address this issue, we designed a course to introduce students to some of the realities of software engineering outside of academia. We describe the journey of building and running an industrial mentoring scheme for this course where students are assigned an experienced engineering mentor from industry who each guide a small team of six through an open source project. <br/><br/>This sets the course apart from the more traditional engineering projects, where students build small and simple system from scratch. Instead we ask students to fix bugs and add features in a large and unfamiliar open source codebase, a game called stendhalgame.org. The mentoring scheme is a key part of enabling that, both in terms of motivating the students but also in providing guidance and advice on how to tackle these kinds of software engineering task. We reflect on the program, which has been taken by more than 2000 second year students over a nine year period. The main contribution is the combination of human mentoring with software that facilitates more meaningful discussions between mentors and mentees that would otherwise have not taken place. As far as we can tell, this is novel in the UK in terms of scale and approach.