Jorge Diaz-Herrera

Achieving synergy in collaborative education

Professional software engineering continues to face problems that involve large-scale (complex) software systems development. Such efforts typically require team collaboration over months, possibly years. Once implemented, the system must be maintained for sometimes decades. This development and maintenance life cycle requires not only technical knowledge and skills in software development, but also the knowledge and skills associated with software process. We believe the traditional computer science curriculum fails to consider this spectrum of needs. We also believe, however, that software engineering must use certain elements of the core knowledge and skills taught by computer scientists as its foundation. We describe lessons learned from the 10-year collaboration between Monmouth University and the Software Engineering Center of the US Armys CECOM (Communications Electronics Command). The center recruits electrical engineering and computer science graduates from academic institutions in the geographic regions surrounding its various installations to be part of its intern program; Monmouth University, in turn, incorporates the demands of the intern program in its Master of Science in software engineering curriculum.

Educating industrial-strength software engineers

A roadmap is proposed for integrating trends in software technology and product development into a graduate curriculum in software engineering. We contend that the causal relationship between building model solutions and developing products from these solutions, provides a sound basis for industrial strength software engineering. We illustrate the impact of modern software technology on the two fundamental, complementary sets of activities of domain engineering and application engineering. This is presented within a scheme for integrating design abstractions, such as architectural styles, frameworks, and patterns, with domain models and product generation. We address questions such as where in the spectrum of technology development do our current education programs fit? Is the current focus on architectures (patterns, frameworks and the like) a passing fad or a true ingredient for a mature software profession? What kind of software engineers should we be preparing for the 21st century?.

IEEE-CS/ACM computing curriculum software engineering volume project

The Software Engineering Volume is part of the IEEE-CS/ACM Computing Curriculum effort that began in the Fall of 1998 when individuals from the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM formed a Steering Committee and began work on the Computer Science Volume. This Steering Committee came to the conclusion that the area of computing had gone beyond the boundaries of computer science and that one volume could not effectively cover the newer areas that had been developed. It was decided to split the Computing Curriculum effort into several volumes; to cover Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, and Information Systems. The Steering Committee continued to work on the Computer Science Volume and appointed others to work on the other volumes.

The importance of static structures in software construction

The static structure is the physical organization of a systems functional modules in terms of their structural relations. It is the packaging of the dynamic structure into textually self-contained modules, taking into consideration the construction strategy and how much of modules internal part should be visible to other modules. Hierarchical modular diagrams (HMD), a module-interface-oriented graphics language that develops can specify the structural relations among modules and map design concepts into a hierarchy of program components independently of the implementation language, is described. The application of HMD to manage a real-time system in a library of separately compiled Ada units is described. It is shown that by using HMD in conjunction with modern software engineering languages like Ada, the static structure can be built earlier in the design process. This lets designers evaluate safety-critical issues as well as reusability concerns long before they make safety checks and implementation decisions. More important, engineers can analyze the effect of approaches to incremental construction before committing additional resources.<<ETX>>

Software engineering retraining - different perspectives

Panel Summary This panel looks at software engineering retraining in industry through industry-university collaboration. The particular context for the panel is the Software Systems Development Certificate (SSDC) under the Software Engineering Retraining Program (SERP) that brought together Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Southern Polytechnic State University, and the State of Georgia. This collaboration was previously reported as a work in progress in IEEE Software, vol. 19, no. 5, Sept./Oct. 2002, pp. 30-34 (“A Collaborative Program to Retrain Lockheed Martin Aero Engineers”).