Using Ontologies to Aid the Teaching of Software Engineering

The software industry today expects software engineers to be skilled at both technical and managerial issues. Technical issues include understanding requirements, design methodologies and writing test plans and test cases besides software skills. Non-technical issues are those related to communication, team work and managing time. Thus, software engineering besides being a science is also an art. Teaching students to apply software engineering thus becomes challenging as it involves not only teaching the techniques but also getting them to appreciate and imbibe the skills in their work life. Software engineering is being taught as a subject of study for post-graduate students. Although, its impractical to teach every student all the techniques and methodologies, it is required that the student understands and experiences the subject and develops the attitude and skill set required. This is dependent to a large extent on factors like the course framework, course time and the aptitude of the class. Hence,it is necessary to tune the teaching to the constitution of the class and at the same time achieve basic goals that are set for the course. Also, there is need for coordination among courses, wherever there isomer than one course taught. To meet this, we propose building a software engineering course framework.The framework consists of one, an ontology of the SE course and two, the class capacity. We then map between the two in order to define teaching methodologies, the areas of focus and the level of knowledge to be imparted. Such a framework, can be used across courses and can help assimilate teaching aids and material as well as aid in better teaching of SE.