Education & Training

Integrated Software & Systems Engineering Curriculum (iSSEc) Project

Many universities teach software engineering (SwE) at the undergraduate level. More than 30 colleges and universities helped create the 2004 model curriculum for undergraduate software engineering education that was published by the IEEE and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Many universities also offer a Masters degree in SwE. Yet the only well-known model curriculum for graduate SwE was created in 1991 by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). Since then, both the way in which software is used and the way in which it is built have changed enormously - some of the strongest influences being the Internet, open source software, agile development, and geographically distributed software development.

As a result, SSA is sponsoring the iSSEc (integrated Software and Systems Engineering curriculum) Project, focused on creating a new model graduate SwE curriculum that reflects current understandings in how to build software, how SwE depends on systems engineering (SE), and how SwE education is influenced by individual domains, such as telecommunications and defense systems. That curriculum will be suitable for a university education leading to a Masters Degree in SwE. Led by Stevens Institute of Technology, iSSEc's first deliverable was an analysis of approximately 30 existing graduate programs in software engineering. The iSSEc team has grown to include participation from around the world, with representatives from academia, industry, and government. An iSSEc Early Start Team with members from the University of Southern California (USC), Carnegie Mellon University, Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), SEI, Avaya, IBM, Lockheed Martin, International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), the ACM, and other organizations is building a strawman of the model graduate curriculum. A fuller description of iSSEc can be found at http://www.GSwERC.org.

Version 0.5 of the Graduate Software Engineering Reference Curriculum (GSwERC) is available for broad community review and comment.