Software Engineering Education: Towards Ethical, Reliable, and Beautiful Software

In this paper, we present our experience with an innovative pedagogical approach to software engineering in a graduate-level advanced software engineering course. Our approach to software engineering and software design education relies on six dimensions: 1) restating the goal of software engineering education to say that software must be conceived of, architected, designed, developed, deployed, maintained, and managed to be ethical, reliable, and beautiful; 2) software should be engineered as a service; 3) apply proven architectural principles; 4) use sound design principles; 5) create rapid multi-modal prototyping; and 6) bring the course learning objectives together by creating a term-long project that creates a solution to a real-world problem using an iterative process. The results from students’ feedback have been very positive with students citing the benefits of the course particularly a) the realignment of software engineering education goals centered on creating ethical, reliable, and beautiful software, b) the focus on clean, sound, and efficient architectures, and c) blending of IEEE SWEBOK, modern microservice architectures, and emerging approaches from software engineering research and open source. We plan to continue developing the course and enhance it in the areas of software reuse, software product design, AI and software design, design for diverse users, and design for sustainability.CCS CONCEPTS •Software and its engineering~Software creation and management~Software development process management~Software development methods •Software and its engineering~Software organization and properties~Extra-functional properties~Software reliability •Software and its engineering~Software creation and management~Designing software~Software design engineering •Social and professional topics~Professional topics~Computing education~Computing education programs~Software engineering education •Applied computing~Education~Collaborative learning •Software and its engineering~Software creation and management~Software development techniques~Software prototyping •Software and its engineering~Software creation and management~Collaboration in software development~Programming