Putting the Engineering into Software Engineering Education

I recently read a paper about software engineering research,1 and once again discovered that its author, Lionel Brand, had published “my” ideas before I wrote them. Thankfully, his writing often stimulates further thinking, and this was no exception. His visionary thoughts on software engineering research started me thinking, but in terms of software engineering education rather than research. Briand wrote about the “paradox of being both highly relevant and increasingly underfunded and discredited.” Personally, I’ve found that software engineering research gets more respect every year, although the funding is abysmally low, at least in the US. This article argues that software engineering is not given enough relevance or support in higher education.