Collaborating with industrial customers in a capstone project course: the customers' perspective

Using capstone projects to teach software development in practice has become increasingly popular. To make the projects as realistic as possible, collaboration with industrial customers is preferable. However, we are lacking information on how this collaboration should take place in practice. Especially the customer's point of view on the collaboration is missing. In this paper we first report how we have arranged the collaboration with the industrial customers in our yearly capstone project of around 120 students forming 7--9 person Scrum teams. Second, we performed 13 semi-structured interviews with the customer companies from the last instance of the course to collected their perspective. The main reasons for companies to participate in the course were: recruiting, getting the software developed and researching new technologies. A good project topic, according to our customer companies, has a clear vision, is suitably important for the customer company, is realistic with enough challenge, is motivating and illustrates the work at the company. Customers emphasized the importance of spending enough time with the teams and actively collaborating and communicating with them especially in the beginning, as the students might be too shy to ask enough questions. Typically, a customer representative used a few hours per week for the project and mostly collaborated with the team on the customer's premises. Overall, the companies were happy with the results: most accomplished their recruiting goals and all projects finished with a functioning product.