Software Engineering graduates are expected to enter the workforce with both technical and soft skills. In addition, software quality is a topic that is becoming increasingly important both because of educational and industry requirements. Software engineering lecturers need to bring their research into the classroom. Bringing all of these together can pose the lecturer with a dilemma that is not easily solvable. This paper presents how problem-based learning, a pedagogical methodology that is popular in medicine and other disciplines, can be used to accomplish these goals in a single course module. It describes a research project which analyses the implementation of problem-based learning within a M. Sc. Software Engineering Quality Module, and evaluates the outcomes against published expectations.

Devising a course for software professionals working in industry depends on several factors. In order to create a course that fulfils professionals' expectations, it is important to take account of the skills of the participants, the time available, and the specific topics to be covered. This paper presents the curriculum of a course in requirements engineering and management intended for software developers with a first-level academic degree in computing and experience in developing real software solutions. This context requires the course to concentrate on topics that were not taught in the participants' previous education and that can have a positive impact on their daily practices.

There is increasing anecdotal evidence of a move of software development projects and employment from North America and Western Europe to Asia and Eastern Europe. This panel will address the current and potential impact of such software offshoring on academic programs in software engineering.

Production of software is growing at a phenomenal rate worldwide. In addition, the increasingly global business climate has accelerated the need for business software. There are too few software engineers to produce and maintain software to meet this demand. One possible solution to correcting this shortfall is reeducating existing non-software employees to become software engineers. For the past two years, the Industry/University (UU) subgroup of the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training (WGSEET) has been investigating active collaborations between companies and universities in which employees without formal software education are reeducated to become software engineers. This paper reports on our findings by discussing our approach to the investigation, outlining the factors involved in successful collaboration construction and execution, and describing alumni views of the knowledge and skills transferred by the collaboration.

Panel Summary For more than twenty years, the IEEE Computer Society has played a leading role in improving the professionalism of software engineers. Its activities include development of a large collection of software engineering standards, publication of many seminal software engineering journals, texts, and reference books, co-sponsorship of undergraduate software engineering curriculum and accreditation activities, and co-sponsorship of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) project. In 1999, the Society launched an effort to certify the knowledge of practicing software engineers. This effort led to the development of the Society’s CSDP certification examination, which was given to a test group in 2001. The examination will be offered to the public through test centers around the world in Spring 2003. The Society has also encouraged the development of face-toface and online training opportunities for prospective test-takers. These opportunities will also be available in Spring 2003.

A model is proposed that formalizes the design of hierarchical module structures. The model is specified by a collection of Z schema type definitions that is invariant across all applications. A particular application is described by specifying the values of generic parameters and adding application-specific declarations and constraints to the schema definitions. As applications, the definitions in the model are used to describe the Conic configuration language and the STILE graphical design and development environment.>