The education of a software engineer

A successful software engineer must possess a wide range of skills and talents. Project managers know how difficult it is to find, motivate, and retain such people. Educators face a complementary, and perhaps more challenging, problem: how to prepare such engineers. The challenge of what to teach software engineers evolves over time as technologies, applications, and requirements change. As software technology has rapidly spread through every aspect of modern societies, the challenge of educating software engineers has taken on new form and become more complex and urgent. The author presents the broad outline of an educational program for a complete software engineer. A new curriculum for computer science has been developed based on these ideas and it started in October 2004 at the University of Lugano in Switzerland.