Software and System Engineering Education: Commonalities and Differences

The complexity of current engineered systems and the increasing role of software in those systems emphasize the need for educating and training qualified systems engineers to meet future demand. As the role of software increases in the overall operation and success of systems it becomes necessary for the system engineers to understand and appreciate the software engineering methods and practices. The same is true for software engineers, where they need to understand the overall complexity of the systems they deal with, and understand systems engineering methods and practices. Over the past five years, educators and professional software and systems engineers from around the world have been working on the development of two graduate reference curricula: the Graduate Software Engineering Reference Curriculum and the Graduate Reference Curriculum for Systems Engineering. This paper provides an overview of these curricula, and how they might influence the quality and effectiveness of the development of future Software Intensive Systems. In addition, the paper presents some of the commonalities and differences between software engineering and system engineering graduate education, and a discussion of the challenges involved in graduating engineers, qualified for work on software intensive systems.