Teaching Software Engineering: A Continuously Evolving Perspective

Software engineering is in a continuous process of change and evolution led by the dynamicity of our world, and hence, by the aim to adapt to and meet the current and future society’s needs. From the educational point of view, one of the main challenges consists in what is meaningful and useful to teach in a software engineering course to enable students to have a solid background and to address and lead current and future software development. In this paper, we outline the importance of continuously evolving education (e.g., course material, and teaching methods) to keep up with the changes in software engineering. This enables students to learn the actual and relevant topics, skills, and technologies in a continuously evolving field where new methodologies, technologies, and best practices are constantly being added. We consider this a valuable development in software engineering education, as it allows for an active and relevant learning experience for students. The novelty of our paper consists of 1) a continuous evolution perspective on software engineering education, 2) exploiting various types of inputs driving evolution, and 3) a set of concrete examples and guidelines that can be generalized and applied to similar courses or in other fields.