Zhiguang Xu, Valdosta State University, USA

Cloud computing is gaining prominence and popularity in three important forms: Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service. In this paper, we will present an empirical study of how these cloud-based services were used in an undergraduate Computer Science capstone class to enable agile and effective development, testing, and deployment of sophisticated software systems, facilitate team collaborations among students, and ease the project assessment and grading tasks for teachers. Especially, in this class, students and teachers could leverage time, talent, and resources collaboratively and distributedly on his/her own schedule, from his/her convenient location, and using heterogeneous programming platforms thanks to such a completely All-In-Cloud environment, which eliminated the necessity of spending valuable development time on local setup, configuration, and maintenance, streamlined version control and group management, and greatly increased the collective productivity of student groups. Despite of the relatively steep learning curve in the beginning of the semester, all nine groups of students benefitted tremendously from such an All-In-Cloud experience and eight of them completed their substantial software projects successfully. This paper is concluded with a vision on expanding and standardizing the adoption of the Cloud ecosystem in other Computer Science classes in the future.

SPI, Cloud Computing, Software Development, Capstone Project, Computer Science Education