A study of software engineering education requirements within a semiotics framework

Academics from the Faculties of Computing, Engineering, Mathematical and Social Sciences seem to attach different meanings to the term “software engineering” based on their professional experiences and biases. This is critical when establishing the content of software engineering (SE) courses, in the accreditation of such courses and also the certification and licensing of practising software engineers. The authors discuss the educational requirements of a software engineering curriculum at Monash University which includes a traditional conceptual foundation in programming and mathematics but with an emphasis on the object-oriented paradigm. The field of semiotics provides a framework for SE curriculum development. Beyond the notations and conceptual and semantic understanding they put considerable weight on the utility of methods in practice. The course includes object-oriented methods, process, languages, tools, validation and verification, standards and distributed virtual environments as the new competencies required in the software engineering profession