A Research Landscape of Software Engineering Education

Abstract

Nowadays, software permeates almost every aspect of our lives. To produce complex and large-scale software products, a large number of software engineers are required. Accordingly, researchers and educators recognize the importance of Software Engineering Education (SEE), and many studies related to SEE have been published in recent years. To synthesize the large amount of research in SEE, some Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) focusing on different areas of SEE have been conducted and reported. However, due to their limited focuses, none of these SLRs is able to depict an overall state-of-the-art for SEE. To remedy this, we conducted a tertiary study on SEE, which identifies 26 relevant SLRs published between 2004 and 2019. By classifying and positioning these SLRs in two dimensions, i.e. the education methods/tools applied for SEE and the research topics related to SEE, we present a landscape of SEE, which locates the SLRs on SEE and their research dimensions. Further, we collected the issues studied in the published research and those that need to be addressed for instructors. This paper also discusses the challenges of the current SEE research landscape.