Teaching software engineering using ISO standards

Ⅵ Standards are designed to promote the efficient use of technology; they can be seen as structured and prepackaged , agreed-upon best practices for specific technologies. Teaching can be viewed as a technology transfer process, and the use of standards can facilitate this process. This paper discusses the uses of both ISO standards and work-in-progress documents in designing and teaching graduate courses in software engineering , it also discusses the approach selected to illustrate to graduate students how an accepted body of knowledge is developed and agreed upon by a group of domain experts. The teaching method involves class simulations of the review process of ISO work sessions and international voting. Lessons learned from both learning and teaching perspectives are also presented. oftware engineering course materials are often based on either textbooks or fairly specialized and research oriented academic papers. Both are useful; however, they often reflect the personal views of individual experts—their own experience , perspectives and biases. In other engineering disciplines, teaching material is based on a common body of knowledge agreed upon by certification bodies, such as professional engineering boards, which review and approve the curriculum of engineering disciplines taught at the university level. Furthermore, standards are key components of the engineering disciplines. Unfortunately, in software engineering there is not yet an agreed-upon core body of codified knowledge, no certification body and, until fairly recently, a scarcity of accepted standards addressing specific software engineering topics. Consequently, for both undergraduate and graduate courses in software engineering, there is a lack of teaching material based on software engineering standards. A handful of countries have developed some national standards in software engineering. However, these national standards sometimes reflect strong cultural biases which make them difficult to use in an international context. Fortunately, some international standards on software engineering are making their way through the ISO subcommittee on software engineering (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7); within this subcommittee there are nine subgroups currently working on software engineering topics. This means that, although only 14 software engineering standards have been published to date, a vast array of material is available (as of June 1996) in draft format, through national standards bodies: 4 draft international standards (DIS), 10 committee drafts (CD) and 20 working drafts (WD), plus an unspecified number of documents that have not yet reached the working draft stage. Standards are designed to promote the efficient use of technology, and can be seen as …