The challenge and practice of creating Software Engineering curriculum

Abstract

Software Engineering is important for the students majored in computer science and technology. This curriculum is intended to provide students with an overall view over Software Engineering as an engineering discipline and with insight into the processes of software development. Creating software Engineering curriculum faces several challenges: (1) Software Engineering has wide coverage, but teaching time is limited. So it is difficult to make in-depth education. (2) Some introductory Software Engineering courses present the principles in isolation from practice. Teaching the lectures seems to focus on philosophy and methodology level, which leads to difficulty for students having no practical experience to understand. (3) Due to the lack of software project practice, students can hardly apply appropriate software engineering methods and technologies to solve problems. (4) How can Software Engineering curriculum satisfy the various needs of different levels? This paper focuses on the challenges above, and introduces how to try to solve them by a case study on the construction of Software Engineering curriculum at Peking University. Finally, this paper gives the future direction for the construction of Software Engineering curriculum.