Teaching Software Engineering Management - Issues and Perspectives

Summary The ACM/IEEE regularly proposes guidelines for software engineering education, in particular what should be part of the software engineering core body of knowledge and how this knowledge can be taught. The 2004 curriculum guidelines define seven student outcomes, two of which relate to teamwork and project control, and one Software Engineering Education Knowledge (SEEK) area on software management. The software management knowledge area is concerned with the entire software development life cycle and hence the control of people and processes. Significantly, the majority of topics within this area are classified with the Bloom taxonomy level of Application i.e. ability to use learned material in new and concrete situations. However the laboratory and assignment exemplars fail to demonstrate the dynamic, human centered complexity of project management. Simsoft, a serious game, has been designed to potentially address this pedagogical gap.