Teaching how to engineer software

Engineering competence requires both a sound scientific foundation and engineering skills for solving concrete problems. Software engineering is based on scientific foundations from several areas including mathematics, computer science, and the economic and social sciences. Active experience exists in the form of empirical observations, laws and theories. Most software engineering curricula address foundations from computer science only, ignore the existing body of knowledge, and provide few means for actively practicing the actual engineering. It is not acceptable to release graduates into software engineering practice without basic ideas about economic value models for software and software engineering, team work, motivation and empirical methods. Neither is it acceptable to release graduates without comprehensive knowledge regarding the already existing body of software engineering knowledge to build upon. This talk provides an outline for comprehensive software engineering education; presents an overview of teachable software engineering knowledge in the form of empirical observations, laws and theories; discusses the use of empirical studies and experiments as an efficient form of learning engineering skills; and proposes different forms of integration with basic computer science curricula. Finally, a concrete software engineering curriculum at the University of Kaiserslautern and first experiences are presented.