IT Curriculum as a Complex Emerging Process

Our civilization runs on software, and the role of software and more generally information technology (IT) is growing all the time. But complaints on software quality are getting more and more common. Software quality depends on many factors and sometimes also universities are blamed - they do not teach the essential skills, that software engineering (SE) education provides too theoretical or old-fashioned courses. Curriculum is a complex emerging system; here are analyzed factors which influence it. The main conclusion is that software is a process and its quality follows from the process quality. Process quality is reached by disciplined practices during the development. Traditionally, software development is based on the predefined path of development phases, which all have their purpose, base practices and outcomes. Opposite to this, there is a trend towards light process oriented software development culture - agile development. In this approach, team work, active role of the client, and incremental product architecture is important. Software development is highly human oriented sector of industry. Productivity can not be increased - at least not dramatically - by tools and automation. New approaches in software industry are based on higher level of automation and reuse of available software assets. Large scale software development is based on reusable platforms, product families, artifacts developed by component factories, but finally especially in the intelligence of the professionals modifying and further developing the available artifacts. In spite of the improvement in automation in "large scale" software development, the main part of software is still developed in very traditional way - from the scratch based on careful user requirements elicitation, specification, system design and implementation. SE curriculum should correspond to the industry needs, only then can universities produce highly skilled professionals, which can satisfy needs of software industry. Development of curricula is supported also by different standards, frameworks and recommendations developed by different interest groups, but the role of these "global" curricula models in the development of high quality university curricula should not be over-estimated. Different approaches in SE curriculum development are introduced. The experiences of authors provide a path of tested "good practices" towards a new curriculum structure implemented in the organizations of the authors.