The software engineering body of knowledge for professional engineering in Canada

In response to the need to define the academic requirements for licensing professional engineers in Canada, the Canadian Engineering Qualifications Board formed a committee whose mandate was to define the core and supplemental bodies of knowledge for software engineering. Some of the issues and the outcome of the software engineering committee´s deliberations are presented in this paper. After examining a number of inputs including national and provincial examination syllabi and curricula of accredited software engineering programs in Canada, a number of core topic areas were defined. These are: discrete mathematics, data structures and algorithms, software development (includes software engineering process, requirements design, construction, testing, maintenance, and configuration management), system reliability and safety, digital systems, computer architecture, operating systems, file and database, and systems and control. these topics generally match well with the existing examination syllabi and curricula. the supplemental areas are less well-defined and include depth in core subjects, depth in areas of specialization, and breadth in application domains.