The Gap between Education and Industry

Tim Lethbridge of the University of Ottawa has done a considerable amount of work in attempting to determine what industry thinks is important knowledge for a software professional to receive through academic and other educational venues through a series of surveys.

The results of these surveys show that a wide gap still exists between what is taught in education versus what is needed in industry. For instance, among the topics required of professionals that had to be learned on the job include negotiation skills, human-computer interaction methods, real-time system design methods, management and leadership skills, cost estimation methods, software metrics, software reliability and fault tolerance, ethics and professionalism practice guidelines, and requirements gathering and analysis skills.

Among the topics taught in most educational programs but not considered important to industry included digital logic, analog systems, formal languages, automata theory, linear algebra, physics and chemistry. Industry and academia agreed that a few things were important, including data structures, algorithm design, and operating systems.

The survey results also demonstrate that it is essential for industry and academia to work together to create future software engineering curricula, for both groups to use their resources more wisely and effectively in the development of software professionals in the future.

Another excellent article outlining the industrial view was by Tockey. Besides stressing the need for software practitioners to be well-versed in computer science and discrete mathematics, he identified software engineering economics as an important ‘‘missing link’’ that current software professionals do not have when entering the workforce.

Tracking Software Engineering Degree Programs. Over the years, several surveys have been attempted to determine what software engineering programs exist in a particular country or for a particular type of degree. By 1994, 25 graduate MSE-type programs existed in the United States, and 20 other programs with software engineering options were in their graduate catalogs, according to an SEI survey that was revised slightly for final release in early 1996.

Thompson and Edwards’ excellent article on software engineering education in the United Kingdom provides an excellent list of 43 Bachelor’s degree and 11 Master’s programs in software engineering in the UK.

Doug Grant of the Swinburne University of Technology reported that Bachelor’s degree programs in software engineering were offered by at least 9 of Australia’s 39 universities, with more being planned.

In June 2002, Fred Otto of CCPE provided the author with a list of 10 Canadian schools with undergraduate software engineering degree programs.

Bagert has in recent years published a list of 32 undergraduate (11) and 43 Master’s level (33) SE programs in the United States, along with some information concerning those programs.

Currently, few doctoral programs in software engineering exist. In the late 1990s, the first Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) programs in software engineering in the United States were approved at the Naval Postgraduate School and at the Carnegie Mellon University. Also, in 1999, Auburn University changed its doctoral degree in Computer Science to ‘‘Computer Science and Software Engineering.’’