Software Engineering Accreditation

Usually, accreditation of educational degree programs in a particular country is performed either by organizations in conjunction with professional societies or directly by the societies themselves. The mechanisms for software engi­neering accreditation in several different countries are provided below. More details are available in Ref. 13.

United States. Accreditation of engineering programs in the United States is conducted by the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Tech­nology (ABET) and until recently, accreditation of computer science programs had been conducted by a commission of the Computer Science Accreditation Board (CSAB).

In the late 1990s, the Institute of Electrical and Elec­tronics Engineers (IEEE) developed criteria for the accreditation of software engineering programs by ABET/EAC (14). ABET and CSAB subsequently merged, with CSAB reinventing itself as a “participating society’’ of ABET. (As part of this change, ABET is not considered an acronym, and the organization bills itself as the accred­itation body for applied science, computing, engineering, and technology education.) CSAB has lead responsibility for the accreditation of software engineering programs by ABET, which accredited its first programs during the 2002-2003 academic year, and as of October 2006 it has 13 schools accredited.

Canada. Canada had a legal dispute over the use of the term ‘‘engineering”by software engineers and in universities (15). The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Newfoundland (APEGN) and the Canadian Council of Pro­fessional Engineers (CCPE) filed a Statement of Claim alleging trademark violation by Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) for using the name ‘‘software engi­neering” for a baccalaureate program. The APEGN and the CCPE claimed the program was not accreditable as an engineering program.

Subsequently, the parties came to an agreement: MUN dropped the use of the title ‘‘software engineering’’ for its program, APEGN and CCPE discontinued their lawsuit (with a five-year moratorium placed on new legal action), and the three organizations agreed to work together to define the appropriate uses of the term ‘‘software engineer­ing” within Canadian universities.

As a result of this action, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) began to develop criteria for accreditation of soft­ware engineering undergraduate degree programs. CEAB first accreditations were of three software engineering pro­grams during the 2000-2001 academic year; nine programs are accredited as of 2007.

In part because of the five-year moratorium, the Computer Science Accreditation Council (CSAC), an accred­iting body for computing programs in Canada sponsored by the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), also started accrediting software engineering programs in 2000-2001, and also now has nine accredited schools (some schools are accredited by both CSAC and CEAB).

United Kingdom. The BCS and the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) have accredited software engineering programs in the United Kingdom for several years. As of 2007, 64 schools with degree courses (programs) that have the words ‘‘soft­ware engineering’’ in their titles are accredited by BCS, according to their website at www.bcs.org.

Japan. In 2000, the Japan Board for Engineering Education (JABEE) applied a trial software engineering accreditation program (18). The Osaka Institute of Technology (OIT) was chosen for this trial, and was visited by a JABEE examina­tion team in December 2000. The criteria used for examining the OIT program included the J97 curriculum model for Japanese computer science and software engineering pro­grams and the IEEE-ACM Education Task Force recom­mended accreditation guidelines (both are discussed in the ‘‘Curriculum Models’’ section below).

Australia. The Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEAust) has been accrediting software engineering programs since 1993. A discussion of the IEAust accreditation process, and how the University of Melbourne developed an undergraduate soft­ware engineering degree program that was accredited in 1996, in described in Ref. 19.