UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) (11/25/87)
Does anyone have ideas about *teaching* CASE in a small college environment.
Here at Penn State Erie we have about 40 students in a two semester
Analysis, Design, and Implementation course (Info Systems in a B school).
Currently we use Excelerator on personal computers, and make do with
3 workstations.
lee
cml@tove.cs.umd.edu (Christopher Lott) (04/25/91)
In article <jls.672529800@rutabaga> jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) quotes me: Either they suffer from NIH syndrome or are simply ill informed. What can be done to reach the ill-informed practictioner? and answers: >Large caliber handguns come to mind... Well, ok fella, I know you're just making a joke. ha ha. But I claim that this is the KEY, absolutely VITAL to solving many of the problem of software. Education and training can help so may programmers, coders, designers, and yes, s/w engineers (drat title inflation!) do their jobs better. It's not that they should sign up for the $2000/week education classes, but starting with perhaps a IEEE tutorial manual would be terrific! Maybe take a course at the local college in software engineering, if there is one. Read some papers, books, etc. Read comp.softare-eng for leads. Time, as always, is the constraint. But (to quote someone else) sometimes you have to stop fighting fires long enough to turn off the gas. Getting the word out about tools, techniques, and process improvement is difficult, and I for one do not joke about its importance. People have to want to learn about this stuff before it will be learned. How does one convince the average practitioner that s/he is doing a below-par job and can improve? Without firing him/her, etc., etc. chris... -- Christopher Lott \/ Dept of Comp Sci, Univ of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 cml@cs.umd.edu /\ 4122 AV Williams Bldg 301 405-2721 <standard disclaimers>
jls@rutabaga.Rational.COM (Jim Showalter) (04/27/91)
>Well, ok fella, I know you're just making a joke. ha ha. Sorry, it was in rather poor taste. I meant by it that the problem of re-education (or, in some cases, EDUCATION) is so difficult that at times it seems intractable and the response is to throw up my hands in disgust and suggest violence... The company I work at sells tools to aid software engineers, but for us to be successful we also have to act as catalysts for the growth of a software engineering culture itself. Our role is often more of an educator than a vendor, and it is a long slow uphill grind in many places. But we are making progress. We're in violent agreement--I have no argument with anything in your fine post. And, by the way, this is a GREAT quote: >sometimes you >have to stop fighting fires long enough to turn off the gas. -- * "Beyond 100,000 lines of code, you should probably be coding in Ada." * * - P.G. Plauger, Convener and Secretary of the ANSI C Committee * * * * The opinions expressed herein are my own. *