To include a panel on needs of the techno-economic environment seems appropriate, as its profile and needs have shifted over the last years. So has the research agenda of computing departments. But these changes are not in sync. Hence a panel on Industrial Needs and the Educational Response of the curriculum should confront educators with the broad spectrum of the IT-labor market by allowing people involved in hiring graduates voicing their needs but also understand the constraints of formal education, notably in Software Engineering.

In view of the recent developments in many countries, for example, in the USA and in the UK, it appears that computer science education (CSE) in primary or secondary schools (K-12) has reached a significant turning point, shifting its focus from ICT-oriented to rigorous computer science concepts. The goal of this special issue is to offer a publication platform for soundly based in-depth experiences that have been made around the world with concepts, approaches, or initiatives that aim at supporting this shift. For this purpose, the article format was kept as large as possible, enabling the authors to explain many facets of their concepts and experiences in detail. Regarding the structure of the articles, we had encouraged the authors to lean on the Darmstadt Model, a category system that was developed to support the development, improvement, and investigation of K-12 CSE across regional or national boundaries. This model could serve as a unifying framework that might provide a proper structure for a well-founded critical discussion about the future of K-12 CSE. Curriculum designers or policy stakeholders, who have to decide, which approach an upcoming national initiative should follow, could benefit from this discussion as well as researchers who are investigating K12 CSE in any regard. With this goal in mind, we have selected six extensive and two short case studies from the UK, New Zealand, USA/Israel, France, Sweden, Georgia (USA), Russia, and Italy that provide an in-depth analysis of K-12 CSE in their respective country or state.

Software Engineering education must account for a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills software engineers will be required to apply throughout their professional life. Covering all the topics in depth within a university setting is infeasible due to curricular constraints as well as due to the inherent differences between educational institutions and the actual workplaces of individual graduates. This paper shows how a flexible simulation environment can link the various topic areas of software engineering in the same way they are interwoven in the daily work of practitioners. The authors report their experience gained in using such an environment in their courses at their different institutions, each one having a very distinct focus. Customization of the environment and respective didactical changes can address students with different maturity levels, educational aims, and backgrounds.

An experience-dominated subject like software project management cannot be learned by merely attending lectures. Additional labs, however, even with only modest real-life projects, call for substantial effort to be spent by the instructors as well as by the partaking students. Our experience shows that using a software development simulation tool enhances the mix of methods used in conventional teaching substantially.

This paper describes a fuzzy neural approach adopted for information retrieval. After a thematic analysis of documents that produces two conceptual sets called themes and rhemes, a fuzzy representation is derived. The fuzzy representation reflects the hierarchical nature of texts and suggests the use of type-2 fuzzy sets. It is then translated into a cascade of two neural networks. The first level in this cascade is a fuzzy associative memory network (FAM) which maps rhemes to themes and the second level consists of a fuzzy adaptive resonance theory network (Fuzzy ART) which relates themes to document categories. The approach was experimentally evaluated.

Worldwide, software maintainers and EDP managers worry about the “Year-2000-problem ” (Y2K). At about the same time, a substantial number of economically developed countries will change their currency. However; this issue obtains unduly little attention. This panel aims at shedding some light on the software engineering aspects of the Euroconversion and relating it to the YZK-issue.

Claims concerning the maintainability of object oriented software usually refer to encapsulation and inheritance mechanisms. However if objects are perceived only from the code level, potentials for higher level maintenance operations are missed. Moreover classical maintenance focussing just on code destroys the relationship that once existed between specification and implementation. The authors present service channels as mechanisms to support maintenance requests on the specification and, for a substantial class of requests, the propagation to the implementation keeping the relationships between specification and implementation consistent.

Software libraries are repositories which contain software components; as such, they represent a precious resource for the software engineer. As software libraries grow in size, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain adequate precision and recall with informal retrieval algorithms. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a storage and retrieval structure for software components that is based on formal specifications and on the refinement ordering between specifications.

Integrating application domain knowledge into reverse engineering is an important step to overcome the shortcomings of conventional reverse engineering approaches that are based exclusively on information derivable from source code. In this paper, we show the basic concepts of a program transformation process from a conventional to an object-oriented architecture which incorporates extraneous higher-level knowledge in its process. To which degree this knowledge might stem from some general domain knowledge, and to which extent it needs to be introduced as application dependent knowledge by a human expert is discussed. The paper discusses these issues in the context of the architectural transformation of legacy systems to an object-oriented architecture.

In various application areas, classes of computer programs can be identified such that each program belonging to a class, can be considered as a special variant of a generic program.

We propose a software life cycle which consists of two phases: rapid prototyping and automatic program generation. Software reusability holds the biggest leverage for both phases. This paper outlines the requirements for supporting this two-phase life-cycle using a software-base as an advanced software management system.

An approach for requirements analysis is presented which combines SA methodology with the method of morphological analysis. The combination of these two system design methods enhances both the search for breadth and the search for depth required to obtain a complete and consistent requirements definition.