RIT´s BS program in software engineering: initial experiences

Summary form only given. In 1996, Rochester Institute of Technology launched the US´s first Bachelor of Science Program in Software Engineering. The program is innovative in many respects, including its interdisciplinary sponsorship by the Departments of Computer Science and Computer Engineering, which are themselves housed in two distinct colleges of RIT. In addition, the curriculum was developed with input from across a broad range of industrial software development domains: commercial off-the-shelf (COTS), finance and banking, embedded real-time control systems, and telecommunications and networking. The result is a rich, broad-based curriculum, where the foundation laid by the core computer science and engineering courses provides the basis for deeper upper division study in software engineering. The curriculum is very much a work in progress. The paper focuses on experiences to date, including issues related to administering a multidisciplinary program, student response to the initial set of courses, and plans for the future.