Rapid Insertion of Leading Edge Industrial Strength Software into University Classrooms

Abstract

Within the United States, the greatest job growth is in software engineering and information management. Open source software (OSS) is a major technology base for enterprise application development. The complexity of technologies used by industry is often an obstacle to their use in the classroom. In this chapter, a major software development paradigm change that occurred in about the year 2000 is explained. CS education programs have been slow to adapt to the paradigm change due to problems such as the tenure system, inexperienced student laboratory assistants, lack of leading-edge software tool support, lack of software team project servers, unavailability of help and mentoring services, and software unavailability. This chapter explains how these problems can be solved by creating an open source-based shared software infrastructure program (SSIP) sponsored by industry, but planned and implemented by SSIP member universities at no cost to member universities.