There is increasing appreciation of the value of team-based, multidisciplinary, innovative thinking for the software industry. This talk will share my experiences and reflections of developing and delivering a new course, on design thinking for software innovation, to ~120 final-year undergraduate computing students. I intend to talk about the motivation for the course, the structure of the course, the formation of projects and teams, the content of the scheduled sessions, extra-curricular activities, the online material, the use of technology (including the University’s new VLE), formative and summative assessment, teaching time and effort, involvement of industry practitioners, and student feedback on the course. I will also consider what I wanted to do and couldn’t (hint: agile, lean, DevOps), plans to evolve the course, and lessons learned.

I intend to then stop talking.

About Austen Rainer

Austen Rainer is a Professor in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He has taught team-based computing projects for many years. He has co-authored publications, including the first discipline-specific book on case study research in software engineering. He co-founded Software Innovation NZ, the national network of software researchers in New Zealand. He likes dark chocolate and single malt whisky, but in small doses and not at the same time. He sometimes plays the ukulele badly, and other times doesn’t play it at all.

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