Software Engineering Education Needs More Engineering

To what extent is “software engineering” really “engineering” as this term is commonly understood? A hallmark of the products of the traditional engineering disciplines is trustworthiness based on dependability. But in his keynote presentation at ICSE 2006 Barry Boehm pointed out that individuals’, systems’, and peoples’ dependency on software is becoming increasingly critical, yet that dependability is generally not the top priority for software intensive system producers. Continuing in an uncharacteristic pessimistic vein, Professor Boehm said that this situation will likely continue until a major software-induced system catastrophe similar in impact to the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe stimulates action toward establishing accountability for software dependability. He predicts that it is highly likely that such a software-induced catastrophe will occur between now and 2025. It is widely understood that software, i.e., computer programs, are intrinsically different from traditionally engineered products, but in one aspect they are identical: the extent to which the well-being of individuals, organizations, and society in general increasingly depend on software. As wardens of the future through our mentoring of the next generation of software developers, we believe that it is our responsibility to at least address Professor Boehm’s predicted catastrophe. Traditional engineering has, and continually addresses its social responsibility through the evolution of the education, practice, and professional certification/licensing of professional engineers. To be included in the fraternity of professional engineers, software engineering must do the same. To get a rough idea of where software engineering currently stands on some of these issues we conducted two surveys. Our main survey was sent to software engineering academics in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Among other items it sought detail information on their software engineering programs. Our auxiliary survey was sent to U.S. engineering institutions to get some idea about how software engineering programs compared with those in established engineering disciplines of Civil, Electrical, and Mechanical Engineering. Summaries of our findings can be found in the last two sections of our paper.

Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space.

Some framework ideas for software engineering education

It is difficult, if not impossible, to find something that is not changing in computer technology: circuits, architectures, languages, methods, fields of application ... The "central object" itself of this brand of engineering, software, represents such a diverse reality (many objects) that the fact that it has only one name gives rise to considerable confusion. This issue, among others, was taken up by Fox (1) and, at this point, I would like to underline that it is more of a pragmatic issue than an academic one. Thus, Software Engineering Education moves in an unstable, undefined'world. This axiom governs and limits the. validity of all educational proposals in the area of Software Engineering and, thereforer all the ideas presented in this paper.

Some framework ideas for software engineering education

This paper presents various ideas aimed at improving the conceptual framework for Software Engineering Education. They are centered on gradually seeing Software Engineering through a 3-p (problem-process-product), a 4-p (people (producars)-problem,process,product) and a 5-p (people (producers)-"problem, process, product, people (users)diagram. These diagrams include concepts such as the rate of change of a problem, the relational complexity of a problem, triphase processes with dominant phases, degrees of software evolution,levels of complexity (with the recognition of disorganized complexity), among others.

A Coordinated Plan for Teaching Software Engineering in the University Rey Juan Carlos.

Un plan para organizar las enseñanzas de la ingeniería del software en las titulaciones de informática de la URJC. Nowadays both industry and academic environments are showing a lot of interest in the Software Engineering discipline. Therefore, it is a challenge for universities to provide students with appropriate training in this area, preparing them for their future professional practice. There are many difficulties to provide that training. The outstanding ones are: the Software Engineering area is too broad and class hours are scarce; the discipline requires a high level of abstraction; it is difficult to reproduce real world situations in the classroom to provide a practical learning environment; the number of students per professor is very high (at least in Spain); companies develop software with a maturity level rarely over level 2 of the CMM for Software (again, at least in Spain) as opposed to what is taught at the University. Besides, there are different levels and study plans, making more difficult to structure the contents to teach in each term and degree. In this paper we present a plan for teaching Software Engineering trying to overcome some of the difficulties above.

An industry/university collaboration to upgrade software engineering knowledge and skills in industry

This paper describes an ongoing collaboration between Boeing Australia Limited and the University of Queensland to develop and deliver an introductory course on software engineering. The aims of the course are to provide a common understanding of the nature of software engineering for all Boeing Australia's engineering staff, and to ensure they understand the practices used throughout the company. The course is designed so that it can be presented to people with varying backgrounds, such as recent software engineering graduates, systems engineers, quality assurance personnel, etc. The paper describes the structure and content of the course, and the evaluation techniques used to collect feedback from the participants and the corresponding results. The immediate feedback on the course indicates that it has been well received by the participants, but also indicates a need for more advanced courses in specific areas. The long-term feedback from participants is less positive, and the long-term feedback from the managers of the course participants indicates a need to expand on the coverage of the Boeing-specific processes and methods. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Experiences on dynamic simulation software in chemical engineering education

Commercial process simulators are increasing interest in the chemical engineer education. In this paper, the use of commercial dynamic simulation software, D-SPICE® and K-Spice®, for three different chemical engineering courses is described and discussed. The courses cover the following topics: basic chemical engineering, operability and safety analysis and process control. User experiences from both teachers and students are presented. The benefits of dynamic simulation as an additional teaching tool are discussed and summarized. The experiences confirm that commercial dynamic simulators provide realistic training and can be successfully integrated into undergraduate and graduate teaching, laboratory courses and research. © 2012 The Institution of Chemical Engineers.

Distance Learning Education of Software Engineering: Principles and Experiences

Whether distance learning spells the end of traditional campuses, as some maintain, or whether distance learning instead represents a powerful addition to a growing array of delivery options for higher education, its impact on higher education is great and growing. Distance learning is creating alternative models of teaching and learning, new job descriptions for faculty, and new types of higher education providers. The advent of Distance and Distributed Learning has raised numerous questions about quality and quality assurance: ² How do established distance learning institutions ensure quality? ² What more needs to be done? ² How do quality assurance agencies view the distinction between on- and off-campus teaching and learning? This talk discusses these issues from the viewpoints of funding organisa- tion, quality assurance agencies and the learners.

An Active Learning Module for an Introduction to Software Engineering Course

Many schools do not begin to introduce college students to software engineering until they have had at least one semester of programming. Since software engineering is a large, complex, and abstract subject it is difficult to construct active learning exercises that build on the students’ elementary knowledge of programming and still teach basic software engineering principles. It is also the case that beginning students typically know how to construct small programs, but they have little experience with the techniques necessary to produce reliable and long-term maintainable modules. I have addressed these two concerns by defining a local standard (Montana Tech Method (MTM) Software Development Standard for Small Modules Template) that step-by-step directs students toward the construction of highly reliable small modules using well known, best-practices software engineering techniques. “Small module” is here defined as a coherent development task that can be unit tested, and can be car ried out by a single (or a pair of) software engineer(s) in at most a few weeks. The standard describes the process to be used and also provides a template for the top-level documentation. The instructional module’s sequence of mini-lectures and exercises associated with the use of this (and other) local standards are used throughout the course, which perforce covers more abstract software engineering material using traditional reading and writing assignments. The sequence of mini-lectures and hands-on assignments (many of which are done in small groups) constitutes an instructional module that can be used in any similar software engineering course.

Learning Software Engineering via Internet

In recent years, education authorities worldwide, including the German Federal Government, have invested heavily in the development of e-learning and multimedia materials for institutions of higher learning. While for some subject matters the benefits of e-learning seem obvious, there are subjects, often consisting of a number of tenuously connected topics or requiring a balance of learning and training, for which it is a valid question whether appropriate learning materials can be presented via the Internet. Software Engineering belongs to this second group, both for its broad collection of topics and, particularly, for the required emphasis on teamwork and communication training.

Software Engineering and eLearning: The MuSofT Project

eLearning supports the education in certain disciplines. Here, we report about novel eLearning concepts, techniques, and tools to support education in Software Engineering, a subdiscipline of computer science. We call this "Software Engineering eLearning". On the other side, software support is a substantial prerequisite for eLearning in any discipline. Thus, Software Engineering techniques have to be applied to develop and maintain those software systems. We call this "eLearning Software Engineering". Both aspects have been investigated in a large joint, BMBF-funded research project, termed MuSofT (Multimedia in Software Engineering). The main results are summarized in this paper.

Systems in Engineering Education: account of an experience

Systems Engineering (SE in the following) has not received much attention as a subject matter in engineering curricula. There are several dozens of universities around the world offering programs (most of them at the graduate level) on systems science and engineering. However, SE is, per se, rarely found among the courses offered by engineering schools. This observation does not strictly mean that systems concepts be left apart. For example, it is usual to find specialized courses for systems of some particular classes (e.g., courses on software systems engineering for computing curricula) or for particular phases of the system life cycle (e.g., courses on systems analysis). Even so, these kinds of courses tend to over-emphasize the importance of specific methodologies and, in consequence, to deviate the attention from the realm of systernness

Teaching software engineering fundamentals to practicing engineers

This paper describes an ongoing collaboration between Boeing Australia Limited and the University of Queensland to develop and deliver an introductory course on software engineering for Boeing Australia. The aim of the course is to provide a common understanding for all Boeing Australia's engineering staff of the nature of software engineering and the practices used throughout Boeing Australia. It is meant as an introductory course that can be presented to people with varying backgrounds, such as recent software engineering graduates, systems engineers, quality assurance personnel, etc. The paper describes the structure and content of the course, and the evaluation techniques used to collect feedback from the participants and the corresponding results. The course has been well-received by the participants, but the feedback from the course has indicated a need for more advanced courses in specific areas.