Re:At UofT... (Score 1)

At the university I graduated from, the professor filled that role for us in the class. In a sense our course (called Software Engineering) helped prepare us for life fairly well. We started with a class of ~30 students trying to go through the entire software life-cycle in the space of one semester. The professor was the "user" that we had to get requirements from and of course also had the end say in whether the project was good enough. To assist in the role he was playing, he'd refuse to answer questions with regard to the project during class, not appear for office hours, emulate Houdini whenever you managed to corner him outside of class, etc.

The course involved documentation, development, integration, some amount of testing, and most of the goodies found in the life-cycle up until actual deployment (we never got further than a final demo). Our marketeer/user professor helpfully changed the user requirements half way through the semester and did not extend the project deadline... essentially guaranteeing that we'd have to release the stuff months before it was really finished. Our testing team never had a crack at the project, the furthest we got were code reviews of one of the three modules for the project.

We had a dedicated support student who set up the SVN repository, did a bit of training for all the students so that everyone could use it, set up a developers forum, and set up bug tracking, so many aspects of a real project were incorporated. Unit testing and integration testing were laughable, but good enough that by the end of the course we were able to present something of a prototype to the professor. The presentation was run more like a customer tech forum than as a sales pitch, so that added one further bit of real world-ism.

In the end, the project was a failure, but it gave everyone a taste of what working on an ill-prepared team could be like and everyone participating in soft-skills interviews after the course had many a horror story to tell to the interviewers.