Preparing Software Engineers for the 'Real World'

Summary form only given, as follows. For years, veteran programmers and project managers in corporate IT departments have complained that universities teach software engineering material that is either obsolete, irrelevant, or far too theoretical in nature. And while academia might disagree with such criticisms, it would at least be useful to have some additional insights into the things that industry believes are important and relevant. This keynote presentation will focus on several of these "competencies," which the academic community may or may not wish to incorporate into the software engineering curriculum. For example, a major area of discussion and debate in industry today involves the tradeoffs between "light", agile software processes versus "heavy" processes such as the ones associated with the SEI-CMM. Similarly, industry practitioners are constantly debating the relative merits of a "zero-defect" quality approach, versus a "good-enough" approach to design, coding, and even testing. And industry practitioners are finding that the best way to teach these concepts, within their own corporate classrooms, involves "war-games" based on realistic simulation models of software projects.