Systems analysis and design: an orphan course about to find a home

A course in Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) as a component of the curriculum in Computer Science (CS) has not traditionally been given high priority at the undergraduate level. As a result students have been poorly prepared for the reality of a working world where large software projects frequently founder, and sometimes fail, for lack of project management and experience. There is a need for "real" software project experience within the framework of a college curriculum. This is not an unrealistic expectation, even though it presents a particularly demanding pedagogical challenge. The solution may be in a marriage between SA&D and Software Engineering (SE). At the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown we are introducing such a component this coming academic year (87--88). We hope that this will go some way toward giving our students a taste for the inherent complexity of large software systems. We also present a recent experience with "real" project development from which we have gained insights for future course design.