Educational experiences in industrial software engineering

The Federal Systems Division of IBM is in the midst of a significant program to provide its software personnel advanced education in the use of modern software engineering practices. Most of today's computer science graduates have a far greater understanding of these advances, their mathematical basis and their application, than do programmers in industry, many of whom have been away from the academic environment for 10 or more years. This paper discusses the program from the education point of view, focusing on the issues pertinent to the teaching methodology, such as classroom environment, instructor staff, maintaining consistency, prerequisites, evaluation of students, teaching methodology, and motivation.