Panel: Shortages of Qualified Software Engineering Faculty and Practitioners: Challenges in Breaking the Cycle

ABSTRACT

One of the most serious issues facing the software engineering education community is the lack of qualified tenure-track (full-time) faculty to teach software engineering courses, particularly at the undergraduate level. Similarly, one of the most serious issues facing the software industry is the lack of qualified junior and senior software engineers. This shortage cycle has existed for some time, and if it is not addressed properly will only worsen, thereby affecting the software engineering field in a more general way than it has already.

The objective of this panel is to put a number of suggestions for improvement into discussion and debate in order to evaluate their potential and viability.

Keywords

Software engineering education

1. Panel Members

Donald J. Bagert, Texas Tech University

Helen Edwards, University of Sunderland

Nancy R. Mead, Software Engineering Institute

Günther Ruhe, Fraunhofer Institute

Michael Ryan, Dublin City University

Hossein Saiedian, University of Nebraska at Omaha

2. Shortage of Qualified Faculty

Many of the institutions that offer a graduate program in software engineering are able to take advantage of part-time, adjunct faculty to teach courses during evening sessions. However, undergraduate programs generally require full-time, tenure-track faculty in order to provide the proper stability and consistency to the degree track. In general, this means that at a minimum four tenure-track faculty per program are needed; if the department also has a graduate program, twice that number may be required in order to cover courses at both levels.

Thus the most important resource challenge that the software engineering education community will face is the lack of enough permanent software engineering faculty.

The following steps may have to be taken to develop the faculty for undergraduate curricula:

1. Some computer science faculty may have to be retrained in software engineering using various faculty-development methods.
2. Distance education and Internet courses may have to be used more extensively, so that institutions can "share" software engineering faculty.
3. Ph.D. programs in software engineering must be established to produce the faculty needed in the long-term. (Such doctoral programs could initially be joint programs that "share" faculty using similar means to those suggested in item #2.)

Through a concerted effort by academia, industry, and government, the infrastructure for faculty development can and should be established.

1. Shortage of qualified practitioners

For years we have heard about the industrial shortage of qualified software engineering practitioners. Many industry managers have experimented with a variety of training methods, including in-house training, university education, training from vendors, and distance education in order to increase the number of software practitioners. The salaries for starting software engineers have drastically increased, resulting in a good deal of salary compression between new hires and experienced personnel.

From the industry manager’s viewpoint, software engineers must have the specialized knowledge to effectively practice software development. This includes knowledge of such topics as cost estimation, working in teams, software life cycles, requirements engineering, architecture, and design. Industry often wants these engineers to have knowledge of the latest tools and languages, but is sometimes unwilling to invest in training for employees who are perceived as making only a short-term commitment to a company.

A number of approaches have been tried, with varying levels of success. These include:

1. Industry can develop and expand in-house training programs to train personnel with other academic backgrounds, or to ensure that existing software engineers are kept current.
2. Universities can be invited by industry to provide more retraining and education opportunities for their staffs.
3. Industry can establish development facilities with large pools of software engineers.
4. Universities can establish more flexible degree program requirements and be more willing to try new forms of education, such as distance learning.

The shortage of software practitioners is significant, and threatens to slow down the increasing role of software in products, services, and the global economy.

1. Panelist BIOGraphical sketches and position statements

Nancy R. Mead, Software Engineering Institute, Panel Co-Chair

Dr. Nancy Mead is senior member of the technical staff in the Networked Systems Survivability Program of the Software Engineering Institute and a faculty member of the Master of Software Engineering Program, Carnegie Mellon University. She is currently involved in research in survivable systems architectures and the development of professional infrastructure for software engineers. She has also served as director of education for the SEI from 1991 to 1994. Her research interests are in the areas of software requirements engineering, software architectures, and real-time systems.

Prior to joining the SEI, Dr. Mead was a senior technical staff member at IBM Federal Systems, where she spent most of her career in development and management of large real-time systems. She also worked in IBM’s software engineering technology area, and managed IBM Federal Systems’ software engineering education department. She has developed and taught numerous courses on software engineering topics, both at universities and in professional education courses. She has a BA and an MS in Mathematics from New York University, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Polytechnic Institute of New York.

Hossein Saiedian, University of Nebraska at Omaha, Panel Co-Chair

Hossein Saiedian, Ph.D., Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, 1989, is currently an associate professor of computer science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Dr. Saiedian's primary area of research is software engineering and in particular models for quality software development, both technical and managerial ones. He is also enthusiastically interested in research in software engineering education and training. Dr. Saiedian's contributions to the software engineering community is quite broad and widely recognized. Recently, Dr. Saiedian was ranked on the Top 10 list of distinguished software engineering scholars published by the Journal of Systems and Software (October 1998). He has been invited to serve as a guest editor of several technical journals and to join the program committee or to chair various national and international conferences. He chaired the 1999 Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training. Dr. Saiedian is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and IEEE-CS.

Donald J. Bagert, Texas Tech University, Panelist

Donald J. Bagert is currently Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Texas Tech University, where he has worked for the past twelve years. Dr. Bagert’s research primarily focuses on software engineering methodologies and process improvement. He founded and is the Co-Director of the Software Engineering Research, Training, and Education Center (SERTEC) at Texas Tech, and is the coordinator of the new Master of Science in Software Engineering program there. Dr. Bagert is also one of the primary co-authors of the recently released Guidelines for Software Engineering Education, which was developed by the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training. He is a co-editor of the FASE (Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education) electronic journal, which reaches more than 900 subscribers in more than 50 countries.

Since 1997, Dr. Bagert has served as a member of the Software Engineering Advisory Committee to the Texas Board of Professional Engineers. On September 4, 1998, Dr. Bagert became the first Professional Engineer in Software Engineering in both Texas and the United States. He is also a senior member of IEEE.

Position Statement: There is no doubt concerning the fact that there is currently a major shortage of faculty and practitioners in all computing disciplines. In the case of software engineering, the situation is compounded by the fact that there are few doctoral programs (and apparently only two in North America, at the Naval Postgraduate School and a new one at Carnegie Mellon) in the discipline. At the same time, events in the U.S. and Canada regarding accreditation and licensing will likely spur both the creation of new undergraduate programs in software engineering and an increased interest in hiring software engineers. The academic situation in particular is similar to the situation faced by computer science in the 1960s and1970s. So, does the solution to the faculty shortage lie in that past experience? The answer, in my opinion, is that there are some similarities, but also several differences. Among the similarities:

1. Adjunct faculty can be used in the short term to fill some of the gap.
2. Software engineering programs are growing primarily out of two different departments: electrical and computer engineering (ECE) and computer science. In the case of computer science, it was mathematics and electrical engineering.
3. At the same time, there are many practitioners in both engineering and computer science, even those teaching and doing research in software engineering, who believe that SE is not a separate discipline, which mirrors the situation facing CS thirty years ago. (There are some amazing parallels: computer science is a science unlike any other, because it grew out of an invention—the computer—while software engineering is a unique new type of engineering, because it concerns the engineering of a non-physical entity: software. In both cases, this has led to strong opposition to the respective disciplines.)

However, there are two major differences between the past situation in computer science and the current dilemma faced in software engineering regarding faculty, and it is in those differences that institutions should concentrate their search for solutions:

1. Educational delivery systems are much more sophisticated than they were thirty years ago. This makes the reuse of courseware in different courses by different instructors (possibly even at different universities) more feasible, and also facilitates long-distance education. (This can also be useful for retraining workers from other disciplines.)
2. It will likely be more difficult to create Ph.D. programs in software engineering than it was to create doctoral programs in computer science, because of the current climate in academia. The 1960s and ’70s were times for growth of new programs for colleges and universities in the U.S. Today, far fewer new Ph.D. programs are created.

In any case, the software engineering faculty shortage is one that must be addressed sooner rather than later. The sooner it is addressed, the sooner more qualified software engineering practitioners and researchers in industry will also be available.

Helen Edwards, University of Sunderland, Panelist

Dr. Helen Edwards is Reader in Software Engineering at the University of Sunderland, UK. Since the mid-1980s her research has centered around software engineering methods: in the areas of both systems development and reverse engineering. She has published widely on these topics in journals and conference proceedings. Her credits also include a number of publications on the topic of teaching software engineering and she has been involved in running workshops on "teaching software engineering" at international conferences. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society and the UK’s Software Engineering Association and has been involved in the IEEE/ACM SWEBOK project. Since 1993 she has been involved in the teaching of systems analysis and design methods and software engineering at the master’s level, specifically for graduates from non-computing backgrounds. She has also been a course leader for the conversion of the master’s course MSc in Computer Based Information Systems from 1995-1999. During this time the course has evolved from a conventional course available in full-time and part-time mode to one available in distance-learning mode worldwide. She has had experience in developing and adapting teaching material to be appropriate for these different learning modes. In 1999 she was a founding member of the team that developed a master’s course in software engineering, which began operation in September 1999. She is currently course leader.

Günther Ruhe, Fraunhofer Institute, Panelist

Günther Ruhe is the deputy director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics with emphasis on Operations Research from Freiberg University, Germany, and a habilitation from the Technical University of Leipzig, Germany. He had a visiting professorship at University of Bayreuth in 1991/92 and received an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship in 1992. Ruhe has published one monograph and more than 60 papers in journals of computer science, operations research and related areas. He served on the program committee of several conferences and was the program committee chair of the 11th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’99). He served as a reviewer for evaluating European project proposals. He is the co-ordinator of the European fifth framework project "Corporate Software Engineering Knowledge Networks for Improved Training of the Work Force" and has project management experience from various other European projects. Ruhe has 15 years of experience in teaching and training for both universities and industry. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the ACM, the German OR Society, the German Computer Society and the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training.

Michael Ryan, Dublin City University, Panelist

Prof. Michael Ryan initially studied mathematics and theoretical physics, taking B.Sc. and Ms. degrees in those subjects. After working as a statistician, he decided in 1971 to try academic life for two years or so, and joined the recently established Waterford Institute of Technology. Nine years later he went to Dublin City University on its establishment, and has been Head of its School of Computer Applications for fourteen years, stepping down from that position last January. He has considerable experience as a consultant and as a non-executive director, and has set up his own company to design and manufacture solutions to industrial problems, some of which have been exported to Silicon Valley and elsewhere (but in lamentably small quantities). In 1989, with the support of the Irish Government, he established the National Centre for Software Engineering to support Irish software companies in adopting best practices. More recently, he was involved with the University of Ulster in setting up the Centre for Teaching Computing, which supports computing academics in Ireland in sharing and developing materials and ideas, and with the Commission of the European Union in setting up the European Thematic Network for Computing, which has a similar role in a European context. In 1996, in partnership with the Irish Software Association, he was involved in setting up the Irish Tech Corps to support the adoption of Information and Communications Technology in primary and post-primary schools.

Prof. Ryan enjoys teaching, and has a keen interest in software engineering education, and in computing education generally. His other research interests include the design and development of embedded systems for industrial applications, and the use of formal logics. He is joint author of one textbook on the application of fuzzy logic to control problems.

The Irish government has appointed Prof. Ryan to the Irish Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, and to the Consultative Committee on Software. He is a member of the Science and Computing Board of the National Council for Educational Awards, of the Forum of Heads of I.T Departments in Ireland, and of the SEI’s Working Group on Software Engineering Education. He is also on the committee of the Irish Amateur Fencing Federation, a sport in which he represented Ireland in the Olympic Games of 1964 and 1968.