The History of Software Engineering Education

As described in Chapter 8, the term software engineering has been widely used since the late 1960s. However, it was only in the 1990s that software engineering gained acceptance as a professional and academic discipline. This recognition is reflected by the growing number of software engineering degree programs in colleges and universities throughout the world.

It was 1976 when Peter Freeman of the University of California, Irvine, and Anthony I. Wasserman of the University of California, San Francisco, organized the first workshop on software engineering education. This workshop was organized as an answer to the gap in the 1970s between the industry that continued to struggle to build larger and more complex software systems and the educators in the universities who continued to create and teach the new discipline of computer science.

One of the milestones in the development of software engineering education was the establishment of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1984. The main mission of the institute was to provide leadership in advancing the state of the practice of software engineering to improve the quality of systems that depend on software. However, based on the recognized importance of software engineering education in the preparation of software professionals, the institute s charter also required it to influence software engineering curricula throughout the education community. In 1987, 1989, and 1991, the SEI published model curricula for university Master of Software Engineering (MSE) programs.

As mentioned in this book several times, software engineering is a broad and diverse discipline. Consequently, all of its content cannot be covered in any curriculum. To cope with this challenge, the SEI designers of the MSE curriculum used a broad view of software engineering, including some topics that are not part of a typical engineering curriculum.

The late 1980s and early 1990s produced a steady growth of MSE programs in U.S. universities. Because the term software engineering is still controversial , many of the new programs have different titles. The same phenomenon happened in other places on the globe. Although the structures of university curricula differ greatly from country to country, there are many programs worldwide that can be cited as software engineering programs.