Project under way to achieve practical software engineering goals

The government is implementing a programme to develop open source software and help the students achieve practical software engineering goals.
National Fund for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has provided Rs 37.63 million to execute the programme in National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences (NU-FAST), an official source on Sunday told APP that the project would also help address the issue of the scarcity of quality faculty in most of the universities.
About the key objectives of the programme, he said these are to help software industry by providing them with the workforce that has worked on industrial strength projects, thus reducing the costs of training programmes required for new inductees.
The benefits are to provide training to IT/CS students keeping in view the requirements of their prospective employers, ie, the software industry and allowing students to learn good programming practices by reading professionally written high-quality code and by getting feedback from professionals.
He said the programme entitled 'Integration of Open Source Software Projects in IT Education' would also help prepare the students for their utilisation in the software industry.
Open source software development is a very well co-ordinated and properly engineered practice on a larger scale, he said, and added typically, an individual or a small group of people starts work on a project.
After reaching a certain maturity level, the project is floated as open-source and volunteers are invited to participate in the development effort.