Curriculum development in educating undergraduate software engineers - are students being prepared for the profession?

The growing importance of software and its role in society places greater emphasis on developing suitably skilled software engineering graduates. In developing suitable curricula, it is vital that we understand standard models of software education, the educational processes and outcomes for the students. This is important not only for students completing a software engineering degree, but also once they have graduated and used their skills as practitioners. Here, we report on a survey of past students who have completed an undergraduate degree in software engineering and compare their perceptions with current efforts to standardise undergraduate software engineering curricula.