Essence: A framework to help bridge the gap between software engineering education and industry needs

Given the time limit, software engineering courses in universities can only emphasize a particular development approach or method; therefore, it is challenging to prepare graduates to face the diverse range of approaches and methods used by industry. One of the issues software engineering education faces is the lack of a framework to understand and compare the similarities and differences among diverse practices used by different companies versus what students learn at school. Software Engineering Methods and Theory (SEMAT) is a new international initiative that bridges the gap among industry, education and research. SEMAT latest result is the submission to OMG standard, namely the Essence - Kernel and Language for Software Engineering. Instead of teaching diverse range of software engineering development methods, Essence provides a novel way of thinking of the different software development methods and approaches. This paper discusses the value of Essence to software engineering education and the preliminary feedback from university professors and lecturers.