A comparative analysis of the topic areas of computer science, software engineering, and information systems

There have been many successes over the years in defining and refining curricula’ for the related fields of computer science (CS), software engineering (SE), and information systems (IS) [l-12], but there have been surprisingly few attempts to compare and contrast those curricula. There are valid reasons for performing such an analysis. The three fields taken together represent much of academia’s coverage of the use of computers and the creation of software to solve problems (for other coverage, such as the field known as computer engineering, see section 2.4). It is important that this coverage be complete and cohesive. Even if in the beginning there was some sort of vital and planned interrelationship between the topics, their separate evolution may have resulted in undesirable couplings and lack of cohesion when considered from the broader computing perspective. Therefore it is important to ask several questions: