Continuous Curriculum Restructuring in a Graduate Software Engineering Program

Background

Although software engineering was recognized as a field in 1968 at the NATO sponsored conference on the subject (Naur, 1968), it took universities and colleges a significant amount of time to respond to that fact. It was not until 1986 that Monmouth University (MU) started a graduate program dedicated to software engineering, which was offered by its Computer Science Department. In 1995 Monmouth created the first Software Engineering Department in United States. Now it is one of the pioneer universities offering a bachelor’s degree in software engineering.

One motivation for creating a separate software engineering program and department was the awareness of the skills that industry would like students to have upon graduation, which are not stressed by most computer science curricula. These skills include teamwork, communications, time management, engineering problem solving, quantitative and qualitative process management, reuse, requirements management, system architecture, testing and project management.

As one of the few universities with extensive and comprehensive experience in offering software engineering programs, we have learned much about providing such a program. With more and more undergraduate software engineering programs appearing, we feel it is beneficial to other institutions for us to share the problems encountered and lessons learned over the past 21 years. A summary of the problems encountered and the lessons learned are presented here:

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  Continuous curriculum restructuring. One can expect to revisit the overall curriculum of the program every four to five years, in order to accommodate changes in industry practice and educational expectations. This is reflected also in the historical investigation of the graduate software engineering curriculum reported in (Duggins, 2002).

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  Continuous course content restructuring. It is critically needed due to the dynamics of the field. The continuous development of course content implies also a continuous development of course projects, and dealing with dated textbooks, ever changing operating systems, programming languages and software tools.

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  Hiring and retaining faculty. The need for new faculty to have a record of sustained scholarly accomplishments and industrial experience enforces great restrictions on the number of available candidates, as it was also notified by Glass (2003). Retaining faculty is complicated by the fact that in addition to performing their normal teaching duties SE faculty must continually keep up with changes in the field as a whole.

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  Influence of the diversity of the student body on the curriculum and course content. Issues raised by a diversity of educational backgrounds, employment status, educational goals, and communication skills introduce challenges that need to be dealt with by any software engineering program.