Systems engineering course as a backbone of the computer engineering curricula

Systems engineering is a discipline to guide the engineering process of complex systems. It has its roots in the military domain, where it helped to combine multiple technical disciplines into advanced systems. Today, systems engineering principles are applied successfully in many application areas and complex computer-based systems is one of the most common ones. In this paper we describe how a systems engineering course can serve as a backbone for the computer engineering curricula. The main importance lays in the fact that today the students should not only know the components of systems, but also about the nature of the life cycle, the role of requirements analysis and different aspects of requirements, understand different types of specifications, learn how to use specifications throughout the design process, learn about systems testing, maintenance and management, get acquainted with project management principles, version management and quality assurance. In our approach the system engineering course is an introductory course for the entire curricula and the projects stemming from that course will be continuously developed throughout the other courses. The know-how introduced in that course will be gradually enforced with the follow-up courses, although these courses do not focus directly on systems engineering issues.