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An investigation of software engineering curricula

Kitchenham, Barbara; Budgen, David; Brereton, Pearl; Woodall, Philip

Authors

Barbara Kitchenham

Pearl Brereton

Philip Woodall



Abstract

We adapted a survey instrument developed by Timothy Lethbridge to assess the extent to which the education delivered by four UK universities matches the requirements of the software industry. We propose a survey methodology that we believe addresses the research question more appropriately than the one used by Lethbridge. In particular, we suggest that restricting the scope of the survey to address the question of whether the curricula for a specific university addressed the needs of its own students, allowed us to identify an appropriate target population. However, our own survey suffered from several problems. In particular the questions used in the survey are not ideal, and the response rate was poor. Although the poor response rate reduces the value of our results, our survey appears to confirm several of Lethbridge's observations with respect to the over-emphasis of mathematical topics and the under-emphasis on business topics. We also have a close agreement with respect to the relative importance of different software engineering topics. However the set of topics, that we found were taught far less than their importance would suggest, were quite different from the topics identified by Lethbridge. © 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Citation

Kitchenham, B., Budgen, D., Brereton, P., & Woodall, P. (2005). An investigation of software engineering curricula. Journal of Systems and Software, 74(3), 325-335. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2004.03.016

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Feb 1, 2005
Deposit Date Feb 22, 2025
Journal Journal of Systems and Software
Print ISSN 0164-1212
Electronic ISSN 1873-1228
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 74
Issue 3
Pages 325-335
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2004.03.016
Public URL https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3500957