Teaching Software Engineering Courses: When?

Abstract

Recently, we have noticed that there is an evident weakness among our students in applying and using software engineering principles in advanced courses that require major software projects. We have also noticed that many software graduation projects lack the concrete and correct usage of sound software engineering principles. In an attempt to determine the main reasons behind that, we reviewed the study plans of many IT-related departments, which generally distribute course over years and semesters, and found that software engineering courses are taught early in the plans. However, we argue that such courses should be taught as late as possible to emphasize the engineering principles rather than focusing on the details that are covered in other courses. We conducted a survey regarding that and the results were in favor of our argument.