Software engineering instructor in a practitioners´ world: a job to be invented

The Research and Development Directorate of Elecricite´ de France (EDF) is in charge of the development or procurement of numerous scientific software products, most of them middle-sized to large-scale software. The people involved are not graduates in computer science, but are mostly mechanical, hydraulics or electric transmission engineers. This implies that software engineering techniques are not their first motivation when designing or writing some piece of software. Our Software Engineering and Quality Group must then adjust its teaching techniques to the population concerned, by setting up well-suited courses on software engineering and quality techniques. Moreover, further to the courses, we must offer concrete support to the project teams to help them set up software engineering techniques. This leads to the creation of a new job: the software engineering instructor, who is able to teach software engineering concepts and who can also be deeply involved in software development