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Software engineering: Improving the academic experience

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Wow, is there a more conflicted engineering discipline than Software Engineering.  In my game design class last night during break (or during class hard to tell the difference) I said something about software engineering and one of the students started to describe a senior design project like class.

This is scary.  Really.  In my career I have done flight test on the MD-11 a commercial airliner that was the last new plane from McDonnell-Douglas.  My job on flight test was as part of a team do software tests using the aircraft in flight as a test article.  That sounds more scary than it was.  However, it does make an me an “Expert” on software engineering, at least in my opinion. 

After all I am a legend in my own mind, to paraphrase a Dirty Harry quote, I forget which movie though, and as I recall it was Dirty Harry insulting one of his managers.  Fortunately for him he was a government worker.  Don’t do that in the private sector. 

(Link) View more Man Sound Clips and Clint Eastwood Sound Clips

I digress. 

After the beginning of the death of aerospace in Southern California around 1993, software engineering classes in colleges seem to have froze in place.  Now software engineering is poorly defined, and the curriculum deathly boring for many students.  Unfortunate.

The question I have taken on is this:

  • What is the map to renewing software engineering?

A question I am going to be working on over the next few days.  The answers given to this question by the ACM, IEEE, all seem to be around processes, but is this the best path?

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2011
    I am a PhD student doing my PhD at University of Malaya, Malaysia. I am conducting research on Requirements Engineering Education, and I am collecting data about student's perception about this course in the form of online questionnaire, the population of this study covers all undergraduate software engineering students who have studied Requirements Engineering course. The questionnaire is uploaded through this link www.kwiksurveys.com it will hardly take 10-15min to complete the questionnaire, so friends please help me to carry out my study by filling up this questionnaire.... Thank you for your time, consideration and cooperation. I greatly appreciate your contribution towards furthering the research endeavour.

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2011
    Hey everyone, please Rafia Naz Memon with this important survey!  Students in the US are required to take a Software engineering class so if you are reading this blog, please make sure to do this survey. Thank you Rafia!