Document Summary:

This document was developed through an effort originally commissioned by the ACM Education Board and the IEEE-Computer Society Educational Activities Board to create curriculum recommendations in several computing disciplines: computer science, computer engineering, software engineering and information systems. Other professional societies have joined in a number of the individual projects. Such has notably been the case for the SE2004 (Software Engineering 2004) project, which has included participation by representatives from the Australian Computer Society, the British Computer Society, and the Information Processing Society of Japan.

Purpose:

The primary purpose of this volume is to provide guidance to academic institutions and accreditation agencies about what should constitute an undergraduate software engineering education. These recommendations have been developed by a broad, internationally based group of volunteer participants. This group has taken into account much of the work that has been done in software engineering education over the last quarter of a century. Software engineering curriculum recommendations are of particular relevance, since there is currently a surge in the creation of software engineering degree programs and accreditation processes for such programs have been established in a number of countries.

The recommendations included in this volume are based on a high-level set of characteristics of software engineering graduates presented in Chapter 3. Flowing from these outcomes are the two main contributions of this document:

- SEEK: Software Engineering Education Knowledge - what every SE graduate must know
- Curriculum: ways that this knowledge and the skills fundamental to software engineering can be taught in various contexts