The Environment for the Software Engineer

Abstract

The task of education and educators is threefold:

• to teach basic principles that have a lasting value and can be applied in the analysis of events, phenomena and artifacts;

• to provide insight into the current state of the art and the historic development that led to this state;

• to teach a body of facts, procedures and mechanisms for the application of knowledge.

The fundamental aspects of education apply to every discipline, including software engineering, which has the objective of producing high quality software products and software tools. When software engineering emerged as a separate subdiscipline, most of the effort went into the development of concepts and methodologies. It has become clear in recent years that these concepts and methodologies will not be effective without the support of integrated tools and task-oriented programming environments. It is therefore necessary to pay sufficient attention in education to the engineering of these tools and environments.