Ben Whittle, University of Wales, Aberystwyth & University of York
ben@minster.york.ac.uk
Trudy Levine, Fairleigh Dickinson University
levine@sun490.fdu.edu
The original premise of the group was that at the present time people need to be educated in the techniques of reuse, but that in the future reuse will be an integral part of the curriculum. The group agreed that there is a need to design re-education courses for the generation of software engineers who were not taught about reuse; this topic was suggested as a starting point for next year's discussions. The focus for this year was to try and decide where reuse would fit into a software engineering curriculum of the future. The group looked at education principles and ideas from other engineering disciplines to define the skills and thus the curricula focus for reuse in future software engineering courses.
This resulted in preliminary descriptions for the following courses.
The group assumed certain prerequisites and co-requisites in terms of technical writing and mathematics courses. Courses which bear a strong resemblance to these ideas have been developed by Murali Sitarman at West Virginia University. None of the courses is beyond the reach of current technology and in many ways the approaches are less radical than introducing a specific course on reuse, which is a technique rather than an area of systems development.