Skill can be honed only by working ‘hands on’. Novel ideas evolve into reality when unadulterated fresh minds are made to confront with a challenge. With this view, recruiters sponsor projects to undergraduates every year. However, tracking the progress becomes an unmanageable affair. If the projects are not tracked properly, deadlines slip and the quality of deliverables degrades.
At Acuminate, we launched a program ACT Now, wherein such projects were given on behalf of IT companies to select final year MCA/MCM students. Their progress was tracked and shared with the companies from time to time. These companies were the prospective recruiters.
Projects were offered in technologies / frameworks such as Android, Struts, Hibernate and Liferay. Recruiting firms have an ever increasing demand for resources skilled in these areas.
As these are the technologies in demand, students’ enthusiasm was great! They were hungry for more challenges. The opportunity to gain knowledge about software development processes was welcomed by one and all.
Experienced professors and directors of colleges found this idea brilliant. They not only encouraged the effort but also guided the students from time to time during its execution.
This was a win-win situation for all the stakeholders involved –
* Recruiters were to get projects as well as skilled freshers
* Students were to get professional exposure and placement opportunities
Typically, two or three students were grouped in teams responsible for a single project. They were made to perform every task as one would do in an IT firm. It included understanding requirements and writing SRS, checking technical feasibility, technical R & D and suchlike activities. The students were made to present their understanding and analysis to their college guides.
College guides appreciated this effort and the role of ‘external guide’ in completion of the projects. A couple of college guides raised questions about scope or authenticity of the projects. Their queries were satisfactorily answered with supporting data.
UML diagrams and normalization are essential parts of the project report. Students were trained over and again to appreciate relevance of these diagrams & processes in software development. They were introduced to the usage of use case modeling in effort estimation and costing. Importance of sequence & class diagrams and normalization was stressed upon. All the myths about these diagrams were clarified. Fear for final viva was eradicated from their minds.
Project report is the only deliverable for most of the students. However students were set a goal of completing all the project deliverables including tested source code and relevant documentation such as design and test plans. This re-enforced the sense of achievement among project participants. Students are well on their path to complete the projects and appear for recruitment.
- Amar
At Acuminate, we launched a program ACT Now, wherein such projects were given on behalf of IT companies to select final year MCA/MCM students. Their progress was tracked and shared with the companies from time to time. These companies were the prospective recruiters.
Projects were offered in technologies / frameworks such as Android, Struts, Hibernate and Liferay. Recruiting firms have an ever increasing demand for resources skilled in these areas.
As these are the technologies in demand, students’ enthusiasm was great! They were hungry for more challenges. The opportunity to gain knowledge about software development processes was welcomed by one and all.
Experienced professors and directors of colleges found this idea brilliant. They not only encouraged the effort but also guided the students from time to time during its execution.
This was a win-win situation for all the stakeholders involved –
* Recruiters were to get projects as well as skilled freshers
* Students were to get professional exposure and placement opportunities
Typically, two or three students were grouped in teams responsible for a single project. They were made to perform every task as one would do in an IT firm. It included understanding requirements and writing SRS, checking technical feasibility, technical R & D and suchlike activities. The students were made to present their understanding and analysis to their college guides.
College guides appreciated this effort and the role of ‘external guide’ in completion of the projects. A couple of college guides raised questions about scope or authenticity of the projects. Their queries were satisfactorily answered with supporting data.
UML diagrams and normalization are essential parts of the project report. Students were trained over and again to appreciate relevance of these diagrams & processes in software development. They were introduced to the usage of use case modeling in effort estimation and costing. Importance of sequence & class diagrams and normalization was stressed upon. All the myths about these diagrams were clarified. Fear for final viva was eradicated from their minds.
Project report is the only deliverable for most of the students. However students were set a goal of completing all the project deliverables including tested source code and relevant documentation such as design and test plans. This re-enforced the sense of achievement among project participants. Students are well on their path to complete the projects and appear for recruitment.
- Amar
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