Teaching software engineering—experience from the past, needs for the future

The field of software engineering evolved during the last decade from pure (but excellent) programming towards an engineering discipline including managerial, organizational, hardware and even commercial aspects. Nowadays, engineers have to cope with the development of very complex systems which are composed of various components such as software, hardware, interfaces, etc., and which are expected to guarantee robustness, reliability and even correctness for their products. Thus, the width of the discipline poses a variety of problems to the teaching of the field, but sometimes resulting in courses just tackling the surface of those problems. The paper presents a curriculum for a software engineering course and identifies directions for further evolution.