Synergizing industrial needs and academic research for better software education

The ubiquity of software is making every industry increasingly dependent on it for achieving their core products' functionality. The complexity in a telecommunication network requires not only thorough understanding of telecommunication per se, but software becomes equally interesting. This is the case with many industries, which rely more and more on software as their key enabler. Industry definitely needs a large number of software engineers with potential to be productive from day one. They are feeling impatient at the academic community for not being pragmatic. At the same time Academic community faces many challenges, which often make them thread a traditional path thus ignoring the industrial needs. We present some of these challenges from both the industrial and academic perspectives. We also present how we established a Master level advanced course on software verification and validation through mutual support and collaboration which became highly successful.