Meeting Today's Changing Needs Through the use of Capstone Programs
Abstract: Every academic area must be aware of changing practices within that discipline. This can range from understanding the role of a modern day journalist to keeping up with developments in chemistry. This paper is a report on how changing software development practices in industry, as reflected in capstone projects, influence teaching methods. It is important to keep classroom methods up to date with those used in the real world. In the area of computer science this means capstone projects should provide options for agile software development methodologies as well as more standard techniques such as waterfall, iterative or spiral methodologies. At XXXX we have been working with several regional companies to update our processes to match those being used in industry. We explain the changes made to our capstone course to accommodate agile development and describe other impacts that adopting agile methodologies have had on our course.