Construction of a Software Development Model for Managing Final Year Projects in Information Technology Programmes

Abstract

The final year project (FYP) is considered a capstone course in information technology (IT) programmes and involves the development of a software product. Currently, students are using the traditional software development life cycle approach to manage their FYPs. However, this approach can cause many difficulties. This paper proposes an alternative software development model for managing the FYP in an IT and IT-related degree programmes of study. First, a benchmarking exercise was undertaken to compare the software developed for business purposes with that developed for educational purposes, which took into account the ten project management knowledge areas. The result of this exercise indicated that the differences that exist between business and educational software necessitate the development of a new software development model that is specifically tailored to the development of educational software. Therefore, capability maturity model integration (CMMI) was modified to generate a new version of CMMI – named educational CMMI – which could be used to evaluate educational software projects and detailed mathematical descriptions of the proposed model were composed. As conclusions, the proposed model was then assessed by students’ results and by questionnaire feedback, the results of which showed that the proposed model was both useful and applicable for its intended target users and context.