Senior Project Design Methodology

Senior and Capstone Design Project courses are widely adapted in engineering and computer science curricula to prepare students for the industry and give them the opportunity to work in real-world projects. One of the motivations behind offering such courses is to satisfy the ABET criteria emphasizing the importance of functioning in multi-disciplinary teams. Senior project courses in computer science/engineering are usually designed to be one or two semester-long and they traditionally involve large-scale software systems development. There is also a tendency to assign hardware/software integration projects to prepare students for the competitive job market. This paper introduces an innovative approach to enable students to work in multi-disciplinary teams and develop large-scale software/hardware systems. Programming language and operating system independent component-based software development is extensively discussed and explained with some complex senior project examples.