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BACKGROUND
The impetus for the creation of the first software engineering
Master’s programs in the late 1970’s was primarily due to
pressure from local industry. The first three U.S. programs
were developed at Seattle University, Texas Christian
University (in the Dallas-Fort Worth area) and the nowdefunct
Wang Institute of Graduate Studies in Boston. Of
these three programs, only the one at Seattle still exists today.
By the mid-1980's, these three programs had similar curricula;
the core courses at these institutions focused on various stages
of the life cycle such as analysis, design, implementation, and
testing, while each of the programs had a capstone project
course lasting one or more terms [12].
The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie
Mellon University played a leading role in the development of
U.S. graduate software engineering programs and curricula
during the ten years of existence of its Education Program
(January 1985-December 1994). Among other things,
members of the SEI Education Program developed the Master
of Software Engineering (MSE) degree at Carnegie Mellon,
published a graduate curriculum model [1] and tracked the
growth of Master’s degree programs ([7] and [8]).
The SEI curriculum model, which to this day is the
standard for graduate curricula, was largely developed by
Mark Ardis, who had previously been on the Wang Institute
software engineering faculty. Thus the SEI model provides a
bridge from the earliest software engineering degree programs
to the ones today.
The SEI model curriculum was basically broken into four
parts: undergraduate prerequisites, core curriculum, the project
experience component, and electives. The minimal
undergraduate prerequisites were discrete mathematics,
programming, data structures, assembly language, algorithm
analysis, communication skills, and some calculus.
Laboratory sciences were not required. The six core
curriculum courses were:
• Specification of Software Systems
• Software Verification and Validation
•Software Generation and Maintenance
• Principles and Applications of Software Design
• Software Systems Engineering
• Software Project Management
So, a series of core courses focusing on process culminating in
a capstone project experience was defined in detail, to be later
found in most undergraduate and graduate software
engineering curricula. Even today, several of the programs
covered in this survey have courses with the exact same names
as the ones shown above.
In 1979, there were only three graduate software
engineering programs in the United States; by 1991 the SEI
counted nine such programs [7], and in 1996 (the last year the
SEI tracked programs) they listed 18 U.S. Master’s degree
programs in software engineering [8]. Bagert [2] noted that
two subsequent attempts to compile Master’s degree programs
in software engineering ([9] and [11]) both depended on
responses to survey requests for their lists, rather than
compiling them through literature or web searches, and as
such were incomplete.
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