Is software engineering training enough for software engineers?

Most software engineering courses focus exclusively on the software development process, often referring to problems related to the complexity of software products and processes. In practice, however, many problems of a complex nature arise in which system engineering and other engineering disciplines are important in the development of systems. In such cases software engineers may have difficulty in coping with the entire problem, in the same way that engineers in other fields may have difficulty in understanding the software part. This suggests that the software engineering education of today is inadequate in certain respects. This paper presents a case study of a software engineering course and discusses the difficulty for computer science students to understand and to develop a system which also requires skills in engineering of a non-software nature.