19th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEET 2006)

CSEET 2006 Panel: Industrial Impact through Education -- Lessons Learned from Barry Boehm's Contributions to Software Engineering

Time: Time: April 19, afternoon,

The slides presented at the panel are available below:

• When are our theories (& processes) ready for use?, Professor Victor R. Basili, University of Maryland
• Is it OK to simplify things to make an impact?, Professor Dieter H. Rombach, IESE Fraunhofer Institute
• How Should Researchers and Educators Market their Work to Practitioners?, Dr. Rick Selby, Northrop Grumman Corporation

Software has become a central component in all areas of business and society. Software is used to support, operate, and control machinery, information flows, records, and processes; an increasing number of products contain embedded software. Businesses and the society as a whole run on software.

Software development is a field where technological advances are continuous. Substantial changes in technology occur more frequently in software development than in most fields. For instance, programming languages change every few years, information system infrastructure, architectures and environments evolve quickly, and development tools and methods change periodically. At the same time, software engineering research is continually producing new knowledge and insights that can be applied in practice.

This rapid evolution of software technology poses great challenges to educators to keep up with the technological changes and needs of business. On the one hand it is important to provide students and practitioners the latest information; on the other hand, universities are responsible for providing sound, reliable and proven information to students. A researcher-educator is often faced with a challenge of deciding when to include a promising, novel contribution in the curriculum. Another challenge is that often the new knowledge discovered in research may be complex, yet practitioners and students need clear, practical solutions and examples and may be impatient to absorb all of the theoretical background that is required.

The CSEET panel on this topic will discuss how advances in software engineering research can be transferred to operational, practitioners use in industry, the role of education and training in this process and how the above mentioned trade-offs can be made. The specific issues to be addressed include:

• Balance between completeness of research results vs. ease of learning:
  • How complete and theoretically solid should the curriculum be?
  • Can and should educators simplify curriculum contents if it would result in wider use of the new methods?
• Maturity and validity of research findings vs. timeliness of technology transfer:
  • How thoroughly and for how long should research findings be evaluated by researchers before they are introduced in the teaching curriculum?
  • How should university educators react to popular, "hype" technologies that are not based on sound research?
  • Should educators demand that new technologies already be widely adopted before they are taught in the classroom?
• Popularity and standardization of published models vs. their constant evolution by further research:
  • Are researchers responsible for making sure that good, sound research results are taken into use by industry?
  • Should researchers "package" and release early research results, even though they will require further research and evaluation?

Panelists will address each of the mentioned themes and reflect on how examples of Professor Barry Boehm's work relate to these trade-offs. The panel aims at identifying or proposing principles for effective deployment of research results into practice, given these trade-offs.

Professor Barry Boehm will provide his comments on the panel conclusions at the end of the panel.

The results of the panel will be published on this page after the panel.

This page is hosted by the Software Business Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology at http://www.sbl.tkk.fi/CSEET06panel/