(Continuing) education of software professionals

Abstract

The fields of computing and software engineering are evolving rapidly. Typically, a new generation of a software based product may require 5–10 times more effort than the previous one. This is causing an increasing need for software process improvement in software companies. The improvement is impossible without retraining existing personnel. On the other hand, there seems to be a mismatch between the software engineering education given by the CS departments at universities, and the requirements imposed by practical work in software projects. This problem is difficult, or even impossible to be solved by the universities alone: An active interaction between the software industry and the universities is required. This report describes our experiences with one form of such interaction; i.e. the Sofko project manager education program.