Effective software engineering pedagogy

Accreditation standards have required computer science departments to teach software engineering for over a decade now. Industry statistics, however, suggest that good software engineering techniques often are not being carried out in large-scale software development projects, resulting in unusable software systems on which millions of dollars have been squandered. Society cannot afford to continue to squander precious resources on software fiascoes. We suggest that perhaps how we teach software engineering may have an effect whether good software development is practiced in industry. In teaching software engineering, experience has shown us that students will not be convinced of the benefits of using software engineering techniques until they experience the benefits themselves. Completing a semester-long project is the most effective way of convincing students that software engineering is critical to their professional development as well as to the development of reliable, robust, easily-maintained software.