Abstract
Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as professionals. This article describes the organisation and impact of a mini-conference and project work - the creation of a software product and its introduction in the market - aimed at the development of professional competencies in general and writing skills in particular. The course was evaluated by assessing the students' perception of the development of a number of professional competencies through a questionnaire completed by 125 students from two consecutive year groups. The results indicate that the project work and the mini-conference had a positive impact on students' perceptions of the development of professional competencies. © 2012 Copyright SEFI.

Abstract
The ever increasing number of platforms and languages available to software developers means that the software industry is reaching high levels of complexity. Model Driven Architecture (MDA) presents a solution to the problem of improving software development processes in this changing and complex environment. MDA driven development is based on models definition and transformation. Design patterns provide a means to reuse proven solutions during development. Identifying design patterns in the models of a MDA approach helps their understanding, but also the identification of good practices during analysis. However, when analyzing or maintaining code that has not been developed according to MDA principles, or that has been changed independently from the models, the need arises to reverse engineer the models from the code prior to patterns' identification. The approach presented herein consists in transforming source code into models, and infer design patterns from these models. Erich Gamma's cataloged patterns provide us a starting point for the pattern inference process. MapIt, the tool which implements these functionalities is described.