Software engineering education

A primary charter of TCSE is supporting and promoting software engineering education. The paper looks at the major issues in SEE and their goals.     

Software engineering education: a modest proposal

For the profession to advance, software engineering education must improve. The author proposes a conceptual model for achieving this that is founded on the triad of people, process, and technology. He then outlines a sample curriculum based on his model     

Software performance engineering: a case study includingperformance comparison with design alternatives

Software performance engineering (SPE) provides an approach to constructing systems to meet performance objectives. The authors illustrate the application of SPE to an example with some real-time properties and demonstrate how to compare performance characteristics of design alternatives. They show how SPE can be integrated with design methods and demonstrate that performance requirements can be achieved without sacrificing other desirable design qualities such as understandability, maintainability, and reusability     

Software engineering education: A study on conducting collaborative senior project development

Project and teamwork training is recognized as an important aspect in software engineering (SE) education. Senior projects, which often feature industrial involvement, serve the function of a ‘capstone course’ in SE curricula, by offering comprehensive training in collaborative software development. Given the characteristics of student team projects and the social aspects of software development, instructional issues in such a course must include: how to encourage teamwork, how to formalize and streamline stakeholder participation, and how to monitor students’ work, as well as sustain their desired collaborative effort throughout the development. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which highlights a particular case and introduces the meetings-flow approach. In order to investigate how this approach could contribute to the project's results, we examined its quantitative benefits in relation to the development of the project. We also conducted focus group interviews to discuss the humanistic findings and educational effects pertaining to this approach.     

Software engineering: community and culture

Ideas and techniques from the social sciences can improve the theory and practice of the software engineering discipline. To illustrate the contributions this cross-pollination has made, the authors focus on the nature of paradigms and software quality management systems. Their studies underscore the importance of community in how new technical ideas become accepted, how despite software engineers too often prefer polemic to evidence, and the primacy given to the local guru that transcends formal organizational structures     

Software engineering education at Texas Christian University: Adapting a curriculum to changing needs

In response to the need for skilled software engineers, Texas Christian University, in the Fall of 1978, established a Master's Degree in Software Engineering, the first such degree program of its kind in the country. Because of external pressure, prompted by the absence of an engineering college at TCU, the program was renamed Master's of Software Design and Development (MSDD) in 1980. After three years of experience with the MSDD program, the curriculum was revised in 1981 to reflect the changing needs of the software engineering profession. This revised curriculum, currently in place at Texas Christian University, is described and evaluated. Avenues of future curriculum expansion are explored.     

Software system engineering: a tutorial

Applying system engineering principles specifically to the development of large, complex software systems provides a powerful tool for process and product management. The application of system engineering principles to the development of a computer software system produces activities, tasks, and procedures called software system engineering, or SwSE. Many practitioners consider SwSE to be a special case of system engineering, and others consider it to be part of software engineering. However, we can argue that SwSE is a distinct and powerful tool for managing the technical development of large software projects. The article integrates the definitions and processes from the IEEE software engineering standards into the SwSE process     

Software engineering education: How far we’ve come and how far we have to go

In this paper I trace the history of software engineering education and focus on some of the key players. I highlight what has been accomplished in degree programs and curricula, conferences and working groups, professionalism, certification, and industry-university collaboration. I also look at the challenges that lie ahead—the global reach of education, new delivery mechanisms, new professional efforts, and the need to engage in leadership in software engineering education. What new approaches should be considered? How can we educators maintain our vitality? How can we best nurture new educators and encourage others to join our profession?     

Software engineering with agents: pitfalls and pratfalls

While the theoretical and experimental foundations of agent-based systems are becoming increasingly well understood, comparatively little effort has been devoted to understanding the everyday reality of carrying out an agent-based development project. As a result, agent system developers needlessly repeat the same mistakes. At best, this wastes resources; at worst, projects fail. The authors identify the main pitfalls awaiting the agent system developer and recommend ways to avoid or rectify them where possible     

Software engineering as a scientific and engineering discipline

A new interpretation of software engineering from scientific, engineering, and practical standpoints is proposed. Software engineering is defined as a successor of programming and computer science, namely, its management theory. Features and attributes of software engineering as an original discipline are founded. The structure, content, and concepts of this discipline and its basic elements are presented. __________ Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 3, pp. 19–28, May–June 2008.     

Constructing component-based software engineering environments: issues and experiences

Developing software engineering tools is a difficult task, and the environments in which these tools are deployed continually evolve as software developers’ processes, tools and tool sets evolve. To more effectively develop such evolvable environments, we have been using component-based approaches to build and integrate a range of software development tools, including CASE and workflow tools, file servers and versioning systems, and a variety of reusable software agents. We describe the rationale for a component-based approach to developing such tools, the architecture and support tools we have used some resultant tools and tool facilities we have developed, and summarise the possible future research directions in this area.     

Software engineering and computational physics

The paper gives first a survey of the development of computational physics in the general context of computer science. Then new methods of software engineering, artificial intelligence and functional languages are presented on examples with respect to applications in physics. It concludes with some speculations about the future of computational physics especially regarding the lectures at the 6th Summer School on Computing Techniques in Physics.