In this paper, we present our fundamental belief that a curriculum for graduate software engineering courses should contain a strong application element. Since software engineering is best learned through application, we feel that education of software engineers must have a practical nature. We also identify several issues that we consider key in the development of such courses for graduate and postgraduate students. Our observations are based on our student population which consists almost entirely of full-time working professionals in the process of obtaining a Master's in Computer Science. We have identified the following issues as being key in the development of an advanced software engineering curriculum.

Most object-oriented methodologies use a notation set that depicts the class diagram as a graph of nodes representing classes and edges representing relationships between classes. An important activity in the production of these is the determination of the topology of such a graph, i.e. the form of a valid class diagram. It is the purpose of this paper to provide a set of heuristics and their corresponding algorithms to assist in the determination of such graphs. These algorithms may prove to be useful, particularly to novice and intermediately skilled modellers, as well as for automation of the class diagram generation process.