Mark J. Sebern

The software development laboratory: incorporating industrial practice in an academic environment

Team-based project courses are commonly used to provide students with an opportunity to apply concepts of software engineering practice and process to realistic development efforts. However, these projects may be limited in duration due to curricular constraints or lacking in continuity because of turnover in student teams. Previous reports have suggested a number of ways that these problems can be mitigated. The paper describes experience with an implementation of an old idea, that of a software development laboratory in which student teams work for extended periods on large-scale, ongoing projects in the context of a standardized and evolving development process.

Incorporating software process in an undergraduate software engineering curriculum: challenges and rewards

Milwaukee School of Engineering has one of the first ABET-accredited software engineering (SE) programs in the United States. We describe our experiences in incorporating the core elements of the software engineering process throughout the undergraduate SE program. These elements are integrated vertically as well as horizontally throughout the curriculum, starting with an introductory process course in the sophomore year and culminating in a three-quarter software development laboratory course sequence and a two-quarter capstone project in the junior and senior years. The challenges encountered while using this approach are also discussed.

Iterative development and commercial tools in an undergraduate software engineering course

Many undergraduate software engineering courses combine team projects with discussion of development cycle concepts. It can be difficult to connect these elements in a coherent way, especially when the lecture is a broad survey and the project is sharply focused on meeting the needs of a client.This paper describes one attempt to bridge this gap, by incorporating the iterative development of a classroom example and an object-oriented process based on two commercial software tools. Although the course time frame (an academic quarter) is too short for significant iteration on the team project, students can participate in an accelerated version of the process by making a small increment to the non-trivial example.This approach retains the benefits of a realistic, client-centered team development project, while providing experience in a contemporary software development process based on commercial CASE tools.

SE 2014: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Software Engineering

Revised curriculum guidelines help university faculty create or update undergraduate software engineering programs.

Software engineering course materials workshop

Workshop Summary This workshop will provide participants with an opportunity to discuss and critique software engineering course materials being developed as part of the SWENET project. SWENET is an NSF project designed to create a Web-based community of software engineering education. A key activity in the project is to create, collect, and share software engineering course materials within the context of current accreditation guidelines and curricular models.

Integrating Software Engineering Process in an Undergraduate Curriculum

This tutorial is intended to assist faculty members and administrators who are designing or modifying undergraduate software engineering curricula, and who wish to learn about alternative approaches to incorporating software engineering process. Curricular recommendations developed by the Joint Task Force on Computing Curricula, formed by the IEEE Computer Society and the Association for Computing Machinery, provide a context for this discussion. The applicability of the Personal Software Process (PSP) and the Team Software Process (TSP), developed by the Software Engineering Institute, is also considered. Experienced software engineering educators may benefit from the presentations, hands-on exercises, and group discussions, but the tutorial is designed primarily for educators with less experience in software engineering curriculum development

Developing undergraduate software engineering programs

This workshop provides a forum for discussing issues related to the development of undergraduate software engineering programs. Participants discuss means by which software engineering concepts can be incorporated in either new or existing baccalaureate programs.

The SWENET project: bridging the gap from bodies of knowledge to curriculum development

SWENET: The Network Community for Software Engineering Education is an NSF funded project to develop curriculum modules of value to faculty members desiring to incorporate software engineering concepts in new or existing courses. By design, the modules are self-contained instructional units ranging from a single lecture to approximately one week of course material; in this way, instructors can adopt, adapt, and arrange modules as appropriate to their courses. The original goal was to provide appropriate coverage at the undergraduate level for the areas defined in the software engineering body of knowledge. Recently the focus has shifted to the more focused software engineering education body of knowledge developed as part of the computing curricula-software engineering effort. As such, SWENET is evolving to become a repository of course modules that can support a wide range of educational approaches within the general framework defined by these bodies of knowledge.

Revision of the SE 2004 curriculum model

Software Engineering 2004: Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in Software Engineering (SE 2004) [1] is one volume in a set of computing curricula adopted and supported by the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. In order to keep the software engineering guidelines up to date the two professional societies began a review and revision project in early 2011. This special session will present the results of the review, present a first draft of the revision, and provide time for discussion and input from the computing education community.

Work in Progress - Developing the Community of Software Engineering Educators

SWENET, the network community for software engineering education, is an NSF funded project to produce and organize high-quality materials supporting software engineering education. The project supports faculty members delivering software engineering degrees and also individual software engineering courses in other computing degrees. SWENET also seeks to foster the development of the community of software engineering educators. This paper discusses plans to continue this development beyond the period of the initial NSF grant. The paper begins with a summary of the SWENET efforts to create course materials and other SWENET activities. The paper also addresses future directions in developing shared course materials, and creation of permanent resources and mechanisms for interaction among software engineering educators