Software engineering education in the era of outsourcing, distributed development, and open source software: challenges and opportunities

As software development becomes increasingly globally distributed, and more software functions are delegated to common open source software (OSS) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, practicing software engineers face significant challenges for which current software engineering curricula may leave them inadequately prepared. A new multi-faceted distributed development model is emerging that effectively commoditizes many development activities once considered integral to software engineering, while simultaneously requiring practitioners to apply engineering principles in new and often unfamiliar contexts. We discuss the challenges that software engineers face as a direct result of outsourcing and other distributed development approaches that are increasingly being utilized by industry, and some of the key ways we need to evolve software engineering curricula to address these challenges.