Software Engineering Practice, Research and Education

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. Its objectives of producing high quality software products and software tools are well served by high quality education of its practitioners. When software engineering emerged as a separate subdiscipline, initially most of the effort went into the development of concepts and methodologies. In recent years experience has shown that these concepts and methodologies can not be effectively taught without the support of integrated tools and task-oriented programming environments. We must pay attention to the development of these tools and environments for educational purposes in order to turn out better prepared software engineers.