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Reviews of Curriculum Guides for Professional Software Engineers

Barbara Bernal Thomas Software Engineering Department Southern Polytechnic State University

Abstract Software Engineering (SE) is currently recognized as a stand-alone field of study within the computing disciplines enabling academia’s emergence of Bachelor degrees in Software Engineering. This paper examines the recent successful accreditation in the United States of BS in Software Engineering programs by ABET to answer the question of what to teach future professional software engineers. The six accredited program’s curriculum is reviewed for similarities and differences. The different licensing views for Software Engineers is presented for insight to what traditional engineering fundamentals should be part of the SE curriculum. The paper begins with the historical evolution of software engineering over the decades. The cornerstones that created the foundations of what we as educators viewed as relevant and current software engineering over the years are explored as a continuum of curriculum progress extending over three decades. The impact and involvement of the SWECC and the SWEBOK project on what we teach in software engineering curriculum are also discussed.

1 Introduction

Since the birth of software engineering at the 1968 NATO conference19, leading universities have included software engineering within the computing curriculum as topics within courses, sole courses, and recently, as sole degree programs. The demand for skilled software engineering practitioners has had unprecedented growth in industry and academia has had a difficult time keeping up. The first framework for a sole software engineering education was proposed a decade after the 1968 NATO conference. Another decade elapsed before the first model curriculum was designed and the software engineering degree programs began.

Marked by continual change, this last decade has seen steady progress in software engineering education (SEE). In a discipline that is this new, the question of what to teach is particularly difficult to answer; in an innovative field that is drastically changing as quickly as software engineering is, the question of curriculum takes on entirely new dimensions.

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright @ 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Bernal, B. (2005, June), Reviews Of Curriculum Guides For Professional Software Engineers Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--14208