1 Abstract— If we are to consider evaluating the available workforce under the spectrums of time, cost, and reliability, the theoretical teaching of software engineering fundamentals is not sufficient to provide the skills and knowledge expectations of the employers. Besides the specialized knowledge, the non-technical skills such as the communication ability within the group for partitioning, assigning, and monitoring task progress are required as part of the background. However, these skills are generally omitted while teaching software engineering due to lack of time, environment, and/or resources. Since traditional lectures are lacking of practical ways of creating software, the focus of this research is to present our experiments during a client- sponsored project in an applied classroom environment at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). Our goal is to provide not only the differences between the theoretical and practical education but also the impact of a real client and the vital considerations and conditions taken by the development team in order to prevent failure in the project are expressed. Finally, to measure the outcome of the applied teaching and conduct future enhancements, a pre and post-knowledge assessment were conducted. Index Terms— Client-Sponsored Project, Focus Group, Software Engineering Education, Software Management, Software Requirements INTRODUCTION A s technology is improving so fast in the new millennium, software systems, and the software architectures have become essential part of the life. Companies are moving from manual labor work to automated systems in order to make the process much cheaper and easier. Software developers have been educated in traditional ways. While most of them taking an undergraduate or graduate course from the colleges, some others are educated with short- term courses or personal initiative in learning new techniques. Because of the education system used in the environment, most of software engineering courses in colleges has not produced supply and quality of developers needed to satisfy the growing demand. Applying teacher dominated education system in the classroom forces the students to memorize the course topics without knowing the real impact of the outlined information. Moreover, not being able to work on a client sponsored problem led the students to face with real-life software engineering tasks while they are having a job at software developer company. While students are educated theoretically in the colleges, companies are desired to hire well qualified, skilful, dedicated and real-life project experienced candidates to join their team because students need to experience the stress and adversity of working in a real-life project [1]. Because of the fact that is expressed, student oriented education system and the real-life software engineering development project are the main differences between most of the other universities and University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR). At UALR, software engineering courses are offered as 3 hours of lecture per week. Starting from the requirements engineering to software testing techniques, only the fundamentals of the design and development steps were taught by the instructor. Students are encouraged and expected to learn the details of the topics by researching them and applying them in the project. Also, relevant homework assignments are carefully selected and given to students regarding the related topics, so that the fundamental principles are clearly understood and applied throughout the project development phases [1]. BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT The project which the students worked was sponsored by Acxiom Corporation which aims to implement a design to extract the most relevant information from the system based on the costumer expectations. Cleaning the data of the customers and producing the desired results require a different set of tools and sequences in which these tools are applied to determine the final outcome. Not only had the selection of this sequence, but also the free- formatted costumer input files are the important part of the information retrieval process. Moreover lack of information and the complexity of the system lead the students to face with a challenging project. The sponsored company of the project was using Data Administrators (DA) to provide the results from costumer data. However, manually specified flows have several problems [2].  They are error-prone;  Some flow may be less optimized than the others;  Different flows may be provided for the same job by the DAs;  Different Associates may not know to reuse past solutions developed by other DAs; and Applied Software Engineering Education Cihan Varol and Coskun Bayrak University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Computer Science Department 2801 S. University Avenue, Little Rock, AR 72204 Tel: (501) 569-8137, Fax: (501) 569-8144 E-mail: cxvarol | cxbayrak @ualr.edu