billwolf@hubcap.clemson.edu (William Thomas Wolfe,2847,) (02/05/89)
From article <530@sirius.UUCP>, by tarry@sirius.UUCP (Steve Tarry): > Exposure to the hardware side of computing is but *one* aspect of what > distinguishes a software engineering education from a computer science > education. I'm the teaching assistant for the undergraduate Software Engineering course here at Clemson, at which we use "Software Engineering Concepts" by Richard Fairley (of the now-defunct Wang Institute of Graduate Studies) as one of our texts; I'd like to point out that neither this text, any other text we use, nor any software engineering text I've ever run across, gives "exposure to the hardware side of computing". It DOES cover: Planning A Software Project, Software Cost Estimation, Software Requirements Definition, Software Design, Implementation Issues, Modern Programming Language Features (Ada), Verification and Validation Techniques, and Software Maintenance. These are in no way hardware topics. The field of software engineering is INDEPENDENT of the realm of application; hardware-oriented applications form a subset of the set of all applications, and one may perhaps take courses which lead to a specialization in that particular application area, but many other application areas do exist. Any application area can benefit from the utilization of software engineering principles, but software engineering is in no way tied to any particular area of application. > It has long puzzled me why there are so few masters degree programs in > Software Engineering and even fewer (none that I know of) bachelors > programs. Puzzles me, too. I tried to find such a Master's program, received a nice letter from the Wang Institute saying they were being munched by Boston University, and ultimately wound up here at Clemson, which has a very nice set of rather practically oriented CS courses. But there really should be more alternatives; Clemson was about the only other really interesting place I could find. Bill Wolfe, wtwolfe@hubcap.clemson.edu