Industrial impact on courses in software enginering: an empirical study on contents of software engineering courses in 1990-2016

Abstract

Development of the curriculum is based on academic knowledge and research, but there are often topics where the industrial impact is clearly present. Developers of curricula should keep the contents up-to-date, both in the academic and professional points of view; especially in software engineering, where much of the experiences come from the companies. Institutions like ACM are making regular model curricula to help in the development process, but they are often a little bit delayed when compared with actively developed curricula.<br/>In this paper, we have three points of view. The first one, based on material collected for paper [1], discusses the topics of master's theses, or how the topics have changed during the time. The second one studies the changes made for the offered courses, and we like to see if changes in the master's topics and courses have any connection. The third viewpoint is a short note how the ACM model curriculum of software engineering has changed at the same time.<br/>