The SEI education program: the challenge of teaching future software engineers

Reviewer: Anthony Ralston

The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) is funded by the Department of Defense at Carnegie-Mellon University. Its education program aims to increase the number of qualified software engineers by helping colleges and universities to improve their graduate and undergraduate offerings in software engineering. To this end, SEI is involved with the following activities: :9Bthe development and dissemination of graduate curriculum modules; the development of recommendations for Master of Software Engineering (MSE) curricula; producing and delivering video courses in areas related to software engineering; and the development of curriculum guidelines and support materials for undergraduate software engineering courses. This paper is a comprehensive and effective description of these SEI activities and related ancillary programs. Because 10 percent of SEI's funding is earmarked for education, this is a considerable program with much greater resources than any professional society can bring to bear on education questions. How successful is it likely to be__ __ Could it achieve an influence comparable to that of ACM's Curriculum '68—the first and by far the most influential among all the many computer science and engineering curriculum efforts over the past two decades__ __ It is too early to say. It will be a substantial challenge to achieve wide implementation of programs developed at a particular university. Two aspects of the SEI program deserve special comment. The MSE program envisaged is analogous to an MBA program, with subject matter from “computer science, computer engineering, industrial engineering, management science, mathematics, psychology, and economics.” This program is fine for a professional master's degree, but the authors also discuss the program's long-term goal of determining “times and places to establish an undergraduate software engineering degree.” I hope the time never comes. Professional undergraduate education in the US, particularly engineering education, is a growing disaster that churns out able practitioners and uneducated people. Let's not follow that road in computer science. (To be fair, the paper is ambiguous on this point. SEI resists recommending undergraduate degree requirements on the (quite proper) grounds that the appropriate path is a computer science major followed by an MSE.) The other noteworthy aspect of the SEI program is that it is “helping educators interested in using Ada in the classroom.” Whatever the merits of using Ada, all computer science educators must be wary of having their educational decisions influenced by the needs and desires of the Department of Defense.