Software Engineering Education in the New Millennium - A View from Asia

Improving software engineering education in Asia is more urgent than ever. The sheer size of Indian and Chinese educational systems has been producing a very large number of computer professionals from these two most populous countries in the world. Some of the graduates are sufficiently trained to engage the "IT" career at a rather low level of the IT eco-system, namely programming, routine maintenance, system operation, and lowlevel software testing tasks. There are a sufficiently large number of software architects in India, but not in China. However, based on my observation, neither country has actually developed adequate and robust software engineering education and training programs that may have hindered the further progress of their software industries. In recent years some name brand companies, namely IBM, Microsoft, and the like, began training programs in India and China to train so-called software engineers. Nevertheless, such programs are vendor-based and product-specific thus would not be able to produce software engineers who can work independently from a product line offered by such vendor