This course gives students the opportunity to experience and critically examine the software engineering process as it is deployed in practice. Students will self-sort into the key roles of a software development team as typically organized in industry: programming, designing, user research, project management, and testing, as well as technical writing of product specifications and user guides. The class will work collaboratively as a team for the duration of the semester to develop a real software product for use by our campus community. Coursework will comprise all parts of the software development cycle, and will include evaluating and working with all the various tools that are part of this process: programming languages and frameworks, source code management like Git, bug tracking platforms, and “dev ops” tools for deploying an application. Work presentations will be structured as “client meetings,” sharing deliverables with campus stakeholders. In addition to hands-on work, the course will include critical reading and discussion of scholarship on the software engineering industry and its history, addressing topics such as: the sorting of coding labor into “front-end” and “back-end” distinctions; the way this is differently valorized often along the lines of race, class, and gender; recent labor organizing within the tech industry; the “Silicon Valley” ideology; the open source ethos; whether (and why) software engineering should be classed as “engineering”; and the shifting nature of computer programming in relation to new technologies like AI. No prior coding experience is required and non-technical students are encouraged to enroll, as the class should include a blend of students willing to take on all aspects of the software development process. Analogous to a journalism department offering a class that publishes a campus newspaper, this course will produce a software product for use by the campus community.