Education for the Future of Software Engineering

The discipline of software engineering is developing rapidly. Its practitioners must deal with an evolving collection of problems and with new technologies for dealing with those problems. Software engineering education must anticipate new problems and technologies, providing education in the enduring principles of the field in the context of the best current practice. Since changes in the discipline cannot be completely anticipated, software engineers must be able to assume responsibility for their own continuing professional development. This paper describes significant changes now taking place in the field of software engineering and proposes some goals and objectives for the professional education of software engineers. Software engineering is concerned with finding practical solutions to computational problems. Over the next few years, software engineering will be required • to respond to society's broadening needs and higher expectations for software • to deal with constantly increasing expectations for software functionality and performance • to gain intellectual control over software development and support. The major challenges that arise from these requirements will be to broaden software engineering's traditional scope of attention and to increase the scale of systems that can be successfully developed and supported. This will require significant changes in the character of the problems that we work on and the methods that we use to solve these problems. The demand for software is rising more rapidly than our ability to supply the desired capability. For example, Figure 1 uses code size to estimate software demand. The growth rate for this particular application, onboard software in manned spacecraft, is nearly 30% annually. The figure compares this demand growth with the growth of programmer productivity, which is only about 5% annually. We clearly need to find ways to increase not only the productivity of software engineers but also the rate at which their productivity grows. This problem is one of several software engineering problems aggravated by increasing system complexity. Software engineering education will play a significant role in solving these problems. The argument of this paper is as follows. As system complexity increases, the essential character of the most critical problems of software engineering also changes. In order to cope with the complexity of large systems and the new kinds of problems that emerge, software engineering must move from an ad hoc basis to a technology-intensive basis rooted in sound models and theories. The principles we use and teach must transcend current practice; they must be codified and teachable. In some cases, such principles can be identified; in other cases we have some systematic understanding that is incompletely codified; in other cases we make do with rules of thumb while trying to develop sound models and theories. Software engineering education must