The role of academe in software engineering education

This paper describes some of the ways in which academic institutions have responded to the challenges of software engineering education. Some of the opportunities and problem areas in software engineering education are explored at the undergraduate, masters, and doctoral levels. Alternatives to academic training are examined, such as in-plant conversion courses and on-the-job training. The paper concludes with some observations on current trends and possible future roles of academe in software engineering education. I N T R O D U C T I O N Software engineering is primarily concerned with the methods, tools, and techniques, both technical and managerial, used to develop and modify software products. For the purposes of this paper, a software product is defined to be production quality software developed by professional software engineers for use by other people. Ideally, a software product is developed on-time and within budget, and satisfies the users' needs in a cost-effective manner. Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific pcrraission. © 1986 ACM-0-89791-177-6/86/0002/0039 $00.7.5 39 A software product might be an application package, a utility program, an operating system, or the software component of a hardware-software-people system. Software engineering is not exclusively concerned with the problems of large software systems; however, issues unique to development and modification of large products are topics of interest to software engineers, as are the issues of scaling down to small products. During the past decade, software engineering has emerged as a technological discipline of considerable social, economic, and intellectual importance. The pervasive influence of computers and computing technology throughout modern society has accelerated the need for competent, professional software engineers and the practice of software engineering is increasingly regarded as a legitimate professional activity. Software is now treated (by most people) as a legitimate technological artifact, rather than a necessary but unpleasant appendage to the computing hardware. While some may doubt the legitimacy of computer science as a scientific discipline (DENN85), there can be no doubt that development and modification of software products are legitimate technological endeavors.