Focusing on software engineering education: a graduate certificate in software engineering

The creation and evolution of a graduate-level certificate program in software engineering is presented in this paper. The software engineering certificate offered by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) is a four-course sequence of graduate courses in the area of software engineering and is intended to provide students with a focused understanding of the principles of software engineering and their application to software environments. The paper discusses the motivation for the original construction of the Software Engineering certificate program by the Rensselaer at Hartford (RH) branch of RPI and discusses the expected audience for the program. The program itself is detailed including an overview of the student audience, an explanation of the prerequisites of the program, and descriptions of the graduate courses in the certificate. The paper describes recent changes to the content of the Software Engineering certificate and discusses the factors that have influenced the certificate as it has evolved.