Projects in a software engineering (SE) curriculum have many advantages for students. For example, students gain teamwork and project management skills. Involving an external stakeholder can enhance the learning experience further. For instance, students have the opportunity to practice stakeholder management. Moreover, working on a project with a real external stakeholder can help them make informed career choices. This external stakeholder can be a company, a government institution, or an organization from civil society, called ‘client’ from here onwards. In this work, we focus on startups to investigate the collaboration between startups and students in SE projects. Furthermore, we developed and introduced a design thinking workshop.
We did the research in a project course at Delft University of Technology. It is the capstone course near the end of the major in Computer Science & Engineering. In this course, students take on a project for a ‘client’. This external stakeholder brings in the project’s objective. Every student group has a unique project from different clients.
We started by analysing these projects from the client’s perspective. We interviewed several star- tups that previously participated in the course. Additionally, we sent a survey to all clients from the previous two years. We incorporated the findings of the interviews and survey with literature. From this, we concluded that startups potentially suffer from a lack of design upfront. This can lead to the creation of an undesirable product. To address this, we developed and introduced a design thinking workshop to our course. Design Thinking is a method for problem analysis and problem-solving. We evaluated the workshop by interviewing teaching assistants who supervised student groups that had participated in the workshop. Additionally, we surveyed the students who participated in the workshop and teaching assistants who joined a test run of the workshop.
From the results of the interviews with startups and survey of previous clients, we synthesized di- mensions of success for projects with students. We found three dimensions in which startups measure the success of a project. The output of a project can be important to them in terms of the 1) product that is developed or what was 2) learned during the project. Additionally, whether students are successfully 3) recruited after the project can also be a consideration when assessing success. Furthermore, we synthesized dimensions of product success and preconditions to success in these projects. We found five dimensions of product success and five preconditions to success.
The design thinking workshop was given to students in the first week they started their project. It constituted half a day during which the students learned to apply the Design Sprint method, a method for operationalizing design thinking in a structured way.
After the projects ended, we evaluated the impact of the workshop. The students and their teaching assistants were both generally positive about it. The teaching assistants, who also supervised non- workshop groups, noticed an improved early process. Furthermore, they noticed that some of their non-workshop groups fell into traps that could have possibly been prevented if the group had joined the workshop and applied the tools. This leads us to believe that the workshop should be extended to all students in the course.
Implication for startups   Spend time thoroughly understanding the problem before engineering a costly and time-consuming prototype. A design sprint is a low-cost way to discover if the problem is sufficiently understood.
Implications for companies involved in SE project courses   If properly motivated, students can create a useful product or prototype, the project does not have to be just a recruitment exercise.
Implications for teachers (of SE project courses with external stakeholders)   Add a design sprint workshop for all students at the start of the course. This thesis shows that adding such a workshop is feasible and improves students’ early process.
Implications for students  Do a design sprint before formulating requirements; this will deepen the understanding of the problem to solve and improve the process, so that it yields a product that is more aligned with the user’s needs.
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This report is a document that presents the project Estimating landing time based on historical data. We want to succeed in designing and implementing a system based on requirements posed by our client AerLabs. The main goal we are researching is whether we can accurately predict the landing time and runway
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OKademy is a start-up that wants to improve the healthcare in the Netherlands by improving the process by which graduated medical students are being matched to a hospital team. This is needed since there is a lack of surgery
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Women are largely underrepresented in IT, girls’ interest in STEM and IT fields tends to drop throughout secondary education. Educational games are a great tool to change the perception of certain topics, as well as changing the behavior of the players. Thus, this report describes the development of a game to make the field of IT more appealing to girls between the ages of 10 and 14.

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Almende B.V., a technologically innovative and research-oriented company, has been working on a new algorithm that optimizes routes for parcel delivery trucks. The algorithm contains novel features, like including the possible use of autonomous vehicles, that are at this moment in time not taken into account in existing route optimization algorithms and thus visualization applications. To this end and to get a more tangible overview of the algorithm’s behavior and performance, they requested to have a customized visualization tool developed. This report describes the process and results of developing such a tool. The tool is presented as a single-page application and has been partly depicted on the cover of this document. The goal of the project is to have a more clear overview of the routing algorithm’s capabilities, by showing its unique features on a map and displaying statistics on the side. In addition, comparing the algorithm to existing ones should provide added insights into the (expected) benefits of the new algorithm. The main purpose of the tool developed in this project is to show insight into the workings of the algorithm and to help with enhancing and developing the algorithm. An added side-bonus is that the tool can also be used to show the performance to various groups of interested parties.