Developing a Software Engineering Curriculum for the Emerging Software Industry in China

China currently has one of the world´s fastest growing software industries. However the demand for skilled software engineers is currently outstripping supply. Educational institutes are the primary provider of software engineers. Not only can China´s educational institutes not meet the demands of software engineers in terms of quantity, the quality of software engineering graduates at the moment is considered insufficient. The need for educational institutes to be more aware of industry requirements for software engineering graduates and to tailor the curriculum and teaching and learning practice to better fulfil these has been recognized as critical to China´s success. To assist with this the Emersion project was established in 2003 to attempt to exchange knowledge and expertise between the EU and China with the goal of developing an industry-oriented education model for software engineering in China. In this paper, we describe our experiences in developing the curriculum which is at the heart of this model and which is based on published best practice and experience of industry and academia in the EU and China