Developing a Data Science Course to Support Software Engineering Students

Abstract

Introducing software engineering students to data science provides an opportunity to reinforce foundational topics while also introducing students to emerging technologies. This paper discusses the experience of developing an undergraduate course that introduces data science. In addition to coverage of techniques in data management, data exploration, and machine learning, the course has a focus on scientific thinking along with the application of tools from software engineering. In contrast to the more common machine-learning first approach of applying algorithms and justifying them in terms of a numerical accuracy measure, we emphasize understanding data and drawing conclusions in an explainable way. In this work, we show how several foundational topics as defined by the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) map to topics in our data science course. We also discuss the design of a semester-long project that is used to elicit various data science skills.