Software engineering education: from an engineering perspective

We explore the development of the curriculum for a new professional engineering degree in Software Engineering. Software engineering is still a relatively new discipline (in its own right) and its place in the tertiary education sector is still not well defined. We are currently seeing the integration of "software engineering" content into standard three-year Science degrees, as well as the emergence of four-year engineering degrees in Software Engineering. Here we report on the development of a new Bachelor of Engineering (Software Engineering) at Murdoch University. This proposal is predicated on the proposition that a three-year degree is just not sufficient to produce graduates with adequate depth and breadth of educational experience to meet the needs of a wide range of industry sectors concerned with producing quality and complex software products. It is our hypothesis that it is the character of an engineering education that may offer an opportunity to produce graduates with a better appreciation of the demands and requirements of the software industry.