Forum for Advancing Software engineering Education (FASE) Volume 11 Number 02 (133rd Issue) - February 15, 2001 Note: If you have problems with the format of this document, try ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Table of Contents Call for Articles, Topics and Guest Editors Articles Letter of Comment on "Outstanding Software Engineers" News Items "IEEE Software" Board Roundtable on Software Engineering Today CC2001 Ironman Document Now Available - Feedback Requested New CACM Column: "The Profession of IT" Calendar of Events IEEE-CS Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) Contact and General Information about FASE ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ From: The FASE Staff Call for Articles, Topics and Guest Editors The FASE staff is always interested in articles or topic suggestions in the areas of software engineering education, training and professional issues. You may suggest yourself as a guest editor for a particular topic. Send articles or topic suggestions to one of the editors, preferably by category: Articles pertinent to academic education to Tom Hilburn ; corporate and government training to David Carter ; professional issues and all other categories to Don Bagert . FASE submission format guidelines: All submissions must be in ASCII format, and contain no more than 70 characters per line (71 including the new line character). This 70-character/line format must be viewable in a text editor such as Microsoft Notepad WITHOUT using a "word wrap" facility. All characters (outside of the newline) should in the ASCII code range from 32 to 126 (i.e. "printable" in DOS text mode). ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Articles ###################################################################### From: Jochen Ludwig Letter of Comment on "Outstanding Software Engineers" I was amused when I read the contribution by Dennis Frailey [which appeared in the January 2001 FASE]. While I agree that the names he mentioned are big names in Software Engineering, it seems pretty funny if somebody in the U.S. asks his friends (again, mostly in the U.S., I guess) about the "world's most outstanding software engineers". The result is a list of people in the U.S. What a surprise! From a European position, we can observe again and again examples of U.S. centric thinking, confusing the U.S. and the world. This applies to politics, too. Well, O.K.: Dave Parnas is not in the U.S., he lives in Canada. That proves it is an international list! Regards, Jochen Ludwig [Dennis Frailey replies: I agree that this is a US-Centric survey. A truly international survey in this case would have involved considerably more effort and, besides, the SMU budget would not have permitted them to cover travel costs of people from another continent. However I would point out that there were a number of non-US people on my list of correspondents and a number of non-US people on the list of names suggested, included individuals from Canada (other than Parnas), France, Germany and Japan. But with the exception of Parnas none of the non-US people was mentioned more than once. (Note too that very few of the US people were mentioned more than once either.)] ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ News Items ###################################################################### "IEEE Software" Board Roundtable on Software Engineering Today Steve McConnell, Editor in Chief of IEEE Software, recently posed the following question to the various boards of that publication: "What is Software?" As Steve explained, "This question is important because it leads to a second question: What is software engineering, and who needs it?" The ensuing discussion formed the basis of the article "Who Needs Software Engineering?" in the January/February 2001 issue of IEEE Software (Volume 18, Number 1), on pages 5-8. The article includes contributions from a number of IEEE Software board members, including Don Bagert, who also serves as FASE Professional Issues Editor. ###################################################################### CC2001 Ironman Document Now Available - Feedback Requested The IEEE Computer Society and ACM recently released the "Ironman" version of its Computing Curricula 2001 (CC2001). As stated in the Ironman document (dated February 1, 2001), "The Joint Task Force on CC2001 was established in 1998 "to undertake a major review of curriculum guidelines for undergraduate programs in computing. The charter of the task force was expressed as follows: To review the Joint ACM and IEEE/CS Computing Curricula 1991 and develop a revised and enhanced version for the year 2001 that will match the latest developments of computing technologies in the past decade and endure through the next decade." The Ironman document is the latest CC2001 draft. The Task Force divided the Computer Science body of knowledge into fourteen areas (including software engineering), and assigned a knowledge focus group to each area. As stated in the Ironman document: "Each of the knowledge focus groups submitted a report to the CC2001 Task Force, which reviewed the area and determined whether the required components of each area were appropriate in the context of the curriculum recommendations as a whole... "...[O]ne of our goals in proposing curricular recommendations is to keep the required component of the body of knowledge as small as possible. To implement this principle, the CC2001 Task Force has defined a minimal core consisting of those units for which there is a broad consensus that the corresponding material is essential to anyone obtaining an undergraduate degree in this field. Units that are taught as part of an undergraduate program but which fall outside the core are considered to be elective." The knowledge focus group for software engineering (whose six members include FASE Staff members Tom Hilburn, Laurie Werth and Don Bagert), defined the following 11 elements of Software Engineering (SE): SE1. Software processes [core area] SE2. Software requirements and specifications [core] SE3. Software design [core] SE4. Software validation [core] SE5. Software evolution [core] SE6. Software project management [core] SE7. Software tools and environments [core] SE8. Component-based computing [elective area] SE9. Formal methods [elective] SE10. Software reliability [elective] SE11. Specialized systems development [elective] The six SE core elements were defined for 30 of the 280 hours of study specified for the minimal six-course core defined by the CC2001 Task Force. The CC2001 Task Force is requesting feedback on the Ironman document. Task Force co-chair Russell Shackelford has stated that "We invite all interested parties to offer their views to the [Task Force] Steering Committee by sending mail directly to me (shackelford@acm.org). For me to be able to ensure that all such input reaches the Steering Committee [by their next meeting], I will need to receive them no later than 11 pm EST Wed, 2/21/01 [4 am Greenwich Mean Time Thursday]. Responses received after that time will likely not be available to the committee [in time for their next meeting]." ###################################################################### By: Don Bagert (Professional Issues Editor) New CACM Column: "The Profession of IT" The February 2001 issue of "Communications of the ACM" (Volume 44, Number 2), inaugurated a new column entitled "The Profession of IT." The first installment, "Who Are We" by Peter J. Denning (appearing on pages 15-19 of that issue), calls for "information technology [IT] to be defined as a profession rather than a discipline and invites computer scientists to cross the chasm." Software engineering is described by Denning as one of 40 specialties within the IT profession. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Calendar of Events ###################################################################### From: Laurie Werth IEEE-CS Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) Here is a calendar update of upcoming software engineering events. See http://tcse.org/ for full information. February 1, 2001 Papers due for WICSA 2001 Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture August 28-31, 2001 at Amsterdam, The Netherlands http://cs.vu.nl/WICSA2001 February 19-21 2001 CSEE&T 2001 14th Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training Charlotte, NC, USA Theme: In Search of a Software Engineering Profession http://www.lrgl.uqam.ca/cseet2001 March 14-16, 2001 CSMR 2001 5th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering Lisbon, Portugal http://www.esw.inesc.pt/csmr2001 March 16, 2001 Papers due for ASWEC 2001 Australian Software Engineering Conference August 28, 2001 at Australian National Univ, Canberra, ACT, Australia Contact: aswec@it.swin.edu.au April 4-6, 2001 Metrics 2001 8th International Software Metrics Symposium London, UK http://www.mmhq.co.uk/2001/metrics/ May 1, 2001 Papers due for WCRE 2001 8th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering October 2-5, 2001 at Stuttgart, Germany and related workshops: - Analysis, Slicing, and Transformation of source code (AST 2001) - Data Reverse Engineering (DRE 2001) - Decompilation Techniques (Decomp 2001) http://reengineer.org/wcre2001/ May 12-19, 2001 ICSE 2001 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering Toronto, Ontario, Canada http://www.csr.uvic.ca/icse2001/ To add events to the software engineering event calendar, go to http://tcse.org/ IEEE Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) IEEE Computer Society ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Contact and General Information about FASE FASE is published on the 15th of each month by the FASE staff. Send newsletter articles to one of the editors, preferably by category: Articles pertinent to academic education to Tom Hilburn ; corporate and government training to David Carter ; professional issues and all other categories to Don Bagert . If the article is for a FASE topic where there is a guest editor, the submission should instead be to that person. Items must be submitted by the 8th of the month in order to be considered for inclusion in that month's issue. Also, please see the submission guidelines immediately below. FASE submission format guidelines: All submissions must be in ASCII format, and contain no more than 70 characters per line (71 including the new line character). This 70-character/line format must be viewable in a text editor such as Microsoft Notepad WITHOUT using a "word wrap" facility. All characters (outside of the newline) should in the ASCII code range from 32 to 126 (i.e. "printable" in DOS text mode). _____ Subscribe/Unsubscribe Information (as of February 15, 2000) Everyone that is receiving this by email is on the FASE mailing list. If you wish to leave this list, send a message to and, in the text of your message (not the subject line), write: unsubscribe fase To rejoin (or have someone else join) the FASE mailing list, write to and, in the text of your message (not the subject line), write: subscribe fase For instance, if your name is Jane Smith, write: subscribe fase Jane Smith But what if you have something that you want to share with everyone else, before the next issue? For more real-time discussion, there is the FASE-TALK discussion list. It is our hope that it will be to FASE readers what the SIGCSE.members listserv is to that group. (For those of you that don't know, SIGCSE is the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education.) To subscribe to the FASE-TALK list, write to and, in the text of your message (not the subject line), write: subscribe fase-talk For instance, if your name is Jane Smith, write: subscribe fase-talk Jane Smith Please try to limit FASE-TALK to discussion items related to software engineering education, training and professional issues; CFPs and other such items can still be submitted to the editor for inclusion into FASE. Anyone that belongs to the FASE-TALK mailing list can post to it. As always, there is no cost for subscribing to either FASE or FASE-TALK! (Subscriptions can also be maintained through the Web via http://lyris.acs.ttu.edu. From there, click on "TTU Faculty Mailing Lists", and then either "fase" or "fase-talk", depending on which list you desire.) _____ Back issues (dating from the very first issue) can be found on the web (with each Table of Contents) at in chronological order, in reverse order, or through ftp at . _____ The FASE Staff: Tom Hilburn -- Academic Editor Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Department of Computing and Mathematics Daytona Beach FL 32114 USA Phone: 904-226-6889 Fax: 904-226-6678 Email: hilburn@db.erau.edu URL: http://faculty.erau.edu/hilburn/ David Carter -- Corporate/Government Editor 6212 Mil Mar Blvd Alexandria LA 71302 USA Phone: 318-767-2339 Email: dacarter@bayou.com Don Bagert, P.E. -- Professional Issues/Misc Editor and Web/Listmaster Department of Computer Science 8th and Boston Texas Tech University Lubbock TX 79409-3104 USA Phone: 806-742-1189 Fax: 806-742-3519 Email: Don.Bagert@ttu.edu URL: http://www.cs.ttu.edu/faculty/bagert.html Laurie Werth -- Advisory Committee Taylor Hall 2.124 University of Texas at Austin Austin TX 78712 USA Phone: 512-471-9535 Fax: 512-471-8885 Email: lwerth@cs.utexas.edu Nancy Mead -- Advisory Committee Software Engineering Institute 5000 Forbes Ave. Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA Phone: 412-268-5756 Fax: 412-268-5758 Email: nrm@sei.cmu.edu