Technology Selection: An Educational Approach

Creating and enhancing a software engineering work force requires several different types of continuing education for software professionals, including: task-oriented education, enhancement-oriented education and selection-oriented education. In this paper, we focus on the important, but often neglected, category of selection-oriented education. We begin with a discussion of technology selection, indicating what it involves, how it contributes to improving the state of practice, and why it is key to technology improvement in general. This is followed by a discussion of some criteria for selection-oriented education programs. We then describe the selection-oriented education activities at the Rocky Mountain Institute of Software Engineering and relate some problems encountered in establishing these activities.