Balancing software engineering education and industrial needs

In the world of information and communications technologies the demand for professionals with software engineering skills grows at an exponential rate. On this ground, we have conducted a study to help both academia and the software industry form a picture of the relationship between the competences of recent graduates of undergraduate and graduate software engineering programmes and the tasks that these professionals are to perform as part of their jobs in industry. Thanks to this study, academia will be able to observe which skills demanded by industry the software engineering curricula do or do not cater for, and industry will be able to ascertain which tasks a recent software engineering programme graduate is well qualified to perform. The study focuses on the software engineering knowledge guidelines provided in SE2004 and GSwE2009, and the job profiles identified by Career Space

ICT for Good: Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward

Abstract-ICT seems well understood as a tool and an infrastructure for delivering information and services for the society and for allowing communications through interactions among the service users -mostly, the digital society. Using ICT for ensuring better life requires far more than good infrastructure, ICT know-how and the various techniques and tools in place. If ICT has to address the real problems of the society, it should be at a rescue being environment-friendly, with real and tangible impact, sustainable, seamless, down to the grass-roots and above all with reproducible experiences. In this paper, we introduce a different perspective of looking into and using ICT, which we call ICT for Good (ICT4G). It is about using ICT for addressing problems of societies with low ICT penetration and changing a society's life for the better. More specifically, based on our observation of current promises ICT gives to society, we discuss ICT4G's distinguishing aspects, opportunities it offers, challenges it imposes along with preliminary roadmap for its realization. A high-level correlation of what we pointed out with a relevant case study (i.e., the eGIF4M 1 ) is presented

Where will professional software engineering education go next?

In 1998 Lethbridge surveyed software engineering professionals and found that there were aspects of their degree that they saw as being useless to their jobs. This study was repeated in 2005 with very similar results despite a significant tightening of the research method. Inspired by this input to the curriculum development process we studied 20 years of curriculum at a University chosen for its very close ties to industry. The study showed that there has been a continual and growing move towards integrating specific technical issues into organisational context. The indication is that curriculum valued by industry will involve students being immersed in business problems rather than learning technical skills and then finding a place to apply them