Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!udel!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sei!maa
From: maa@sei.cmu.edu (Mark Ardis)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: MS in Software Engineering
Message-ID: <5046@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: 13 Apr 88 16:24:15 GMT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University (Software Engineering Institute), Pgh, PA
Lines: 70

I have too much to say to include in one response, so I will start by
pointing to some papers.  The now-defunct Wang Institute of Graduate
Studies had a Master of Software Engineering (MSE) program for seven
years.  I wrote an article describing some of the attributes of the
program:

	The Evolution of Wang Institute's MSE Program
	Mark A. Ardis
	IEEE Trans. on Software Engineering SE-13 (11)
	November 1987.

The rest of that issue of IEEE TSE contains other interesting articles
on software engineering education.

The Education Program of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has
been developing curriculum guidelines for an MSE program.  We recently
held a workshop to define a set of required courses.  A report will be
distributed at the second annual SEI Conference on Software
Engineering Education (April 28 and 29 at the Holiday Inn -- Fair Oaks
in Fairfax, VA).

The workshop produced descriptions of six required courses for an MSE
degree:

	Software Systems Engineering,
	Specification of Software Systems,
	Principles and Applications of Software Design,
	Software Generation and Regeneration,
	Software Verification and Validation, and
	Software Project Management.

For each course we listed topics and subtopics, noted the educational
objective of each topic, cited principal references, described
useful exercises and discussed other teaching concerns.

An earlier report from the SEI describes the topics and educational
objectives in more detail:

	Software Engineering Education: An Interim Report from the
		Software Engineering Institute
	Gary Ford, Norman Gibbs, and James Tomayko
	Technical Report CMU/SEI-87-TR-8, May 1987.

If you want a copy of this report please write to:

	Information Management
	Software Engineering Institute
	Carnegie Mellon University
	Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Be sure to include either a self-addressed envelope or label.  The
workshop report will not be available until after the conference, so
please do not request it now.

I am sorry this looks too much like an ad, but a lot of good work is
described in these papers.  For example, we spent a lot of time at
Wang Institute developing and polishing our curriculum, and we spent
even more time developing a rich support environment to make it
effective.  I tried to summarize that experience in my paper, though I
am sure I have not adequately described it.  Another example is the
first report from the SEI on software engineering education, which
acknowledges the efforts of 65 scientists and educators who
contributed to its preparation.

Mark A. Ardis
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
(412) 268-7636
maa@sei.cmu.edu