Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the Software Engineering Education Knowledge (SEEK) - a preliminary mapping

This paper is the result of a workshop held in Montreal in October 2002 during the Software Technology and Practice Conference (STEP 2002). The purpose of the paper is to present a preliminary mapping of two related but distinct software engineering body of knowledge initiatives, and also a list of proposals to improve them: the guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) and the Software Engineering Education [body of] Knowledge (SEEK). The SWEBOK guide is aimed at identifying and describing the body of knowledge of a software engineering professional who has an undergraduate degree and four years of experience. The intended audiences of the SWEBOK Guide include industry, academia and policy-making organizations. The SEEK is aimed at delimiting the knowledge that professionals teaching software engineering agree is necessary for anyone to obtain an undergraduate degree in this field. The mapping shows that, though there are no major "school of thought" divergences between the two bodies of knowledge, there are a number of differences in the details of each breakdown in terms of vocabulary, level of detail, decomposition approach and topics encompassed.