A curriculum development methodology for professional software engineers and its evaluation

Professional software engineers are the key assets of the core competency of a company developing highly complicated safety-critical software-intensive automotive systems. Professional software engineers have been generally trained through an education and training program home-brewed in the company. However, the conventional curriculum of the program is developed in a rather ad hoc way, and hard to qualify the trainees. In this article, we propose a curriculum development methodology for professional software engineers based on goal model. We define a strategic goal of professional software engineers, and derive three tactical educational sub-goals of acquisition of advanced software engineering, the practice of software engineering and establishment of philosophy of leadership. We propose a methodology to develop a body of knowledge of automotive software engineering, curriculum, and associated teaching methods based on the educational goal model. We applied the methodology to the education and training program for automotive professional software engineers at DENSO. Comparing the previous program, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.