Siemens established a company-wide role-based qualification and certification curriculum, focusing on the topic of “architecture”. Architects play a central role in the product lifecycle of the complex systems that Siemens offers. Since the curriculum's start in 2006 with the “senior software architect” program, we have added programs for software, system, and test architects. This curriculum is meanwhile broadly established throughout Siemens and Siemens Healthineers and other associated Siemens companies. We meanwhile have almost 700 certified architects in almost 20 countries. This industrial experience report describes the curriculum briefly but will focus on how the “architecture” of the training program for architects enabled us to evolve and extend the curriculum over time. The evolution covers not only additional roles, but also keeps the technical content up to date and adapts to modern learning formats as we strive to achieve the most impact in the available time. Our experience may be a blueprint for other key role curricula.

In this experience report, we describe the motivation, experience, lessons learned, and future directions of a software engineering curriculum used at a large international company. The "Curriculum for Software Engineers" project, which developed the content and a role-based qualification and certification program, was started at Siemens in 2006. This paper includes an overview of various kinds of certification in the software engineering area and why we chose the knowledge- and experience-based type of certification. The experience report part focuses mainly on the "certified senior software architect" role, as this role has the longest history and participants from many different business units and countries.

This summary reports on the one-day Workshop on Testing Distributed Componem-Based Systems (TDCS) that took place in affiliation with the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in Los Angeles in May 1999. The workshop dealt with new advances m test methods and test technologies for the emerging class of &stributed component-based systems that are built on basis of middleware software like COM, CORBA, or Java RMI, including syslems comprising Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components The around thirty workshop attendees discussed what efforts m software technology and research are required to cope with testing such systems. Twelve papers out of nineteen submissions were presented.