Towards a process management life-cycle model for graduation projects in computer engineering

Abstract

Graduation projects play an important role in computer engineering careers in which students are expected to draw upon their knowledge and skills that were acquired since admission. To manage the activities of graduation projects, an iterative and incremental approach which aims continuous improvement is proposed as an alternative to a controversial delivery model. However, such integration brings up a set of challenges to be taken into account: e.g. multiple project deliveries, more labor-intensive effort from instructors, and ultimately continuous learning for all participants. One promising way to achieve such an integrated and continuous deployment velocity is to eliminate potential bottlenecks by giving student teams to receive early and continuous feedback. To this end, we propose a continuous feedback and delivery mechanism for managing the life-cycle of a graduation project through draft proposal, literature review, requirements gathering, design, implementation and testing which should produce intermediate outputs at predefined intervals. Most importantly, our approach makes it possible to quantify most of the activities involved in life-cycle process with various rubrics (i.e. measurement scales) that have been purposefully developed. The proposed model promotes the fact that all improvements should be monitored, evaluated and documented. The results of this study indicate that students who were managed using this approach produced better project deliverables and ultimately have delivered better and successful projects.