Skills versus Knowledge in Software Engineering Education: A Retrospective on the Wang Institute MSE Program

The author was a faculty member for three years (1982–1985) in the Master of Software Engineering (MSE) program (hereafter abbreviated as WIMSE) at the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies. This paper distills that experience, organized in the form of questions on the following topics: What is a software engineer?What is software engineering?What has been learned about software engineering education?A framework for analyzing the WIMSE experience will be constructed and followed throughout the questions, with interspersed recommendations appropriate for the SEI Education Workshop. The purpose of this paper is to provide some informal and subjective (and probably idealized) observations on the WIMSE curriculum to complement the more formal and objective information that is available in [2]. The state of software engineering is also seen from the view of software engineering education.