For students, capstone project represents the culmination of their
studies and is typically one of the last milestones before graduation.
Participating in a capstone project can be an inspiring learning
opportunity or a struggle due various reasons yet a very educative
learning experience. During the IT capstone project students practice
and develop their professional skills in designing and implementing a
solution to a complex, ill-defined real-life problem as a team. This
paper reflects on organizing IT capstone projects in computer science
and software engineering Master programmes in a Sino-Finnish setup,
where the projects are executed in a framework provided by a capstone
project course. We describe the course framework and discuss the
challenges in finding and providing ill-defined challenges with
meaningful real-life connection for project topics. Based on our
observations complemented with students’ feedback we also propose areas
for future development.