Reflections on Software Engineering Education

In recent years, the software engineering community has focused on organizing its existing knowledge and finding opportunities to transform that knowledge into a university curriculum. SWEBOK (the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) and Software Engineering 2004 are two initiatives to that end. While these projects have increased SE education's visibility, they've also focused largely on SE's engineering aspects, at the expense of its human and social dimensions. This article describes how a pure engineering approach contributes to traps that SE educators can fall into that in turn can mislead students as to SE's true nature.

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