Engineering study program compliance evaluation to guidelines for software engineering curriculum

Abstract

Improvement of engineering study programs in relation to constant changes to company and organization wishes, association guidelines, student demands, university policies, etc. raise various difficulties. Information and communications technology (ICT) industry is developing in a fast pace and requirements for skills and knowledge expected from graduates are constantly changing. The leading ICT Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) joined forces to develop multiple documents that are regularly revised, published and available to public and include guidelines for development of undergraduate level study programs curricula. These documents cover such ICT fields as computing, computer engineering, computer science, cybersecurity, information systems, information technology and software engineering. In this article software engineering undergraduate study program compliance with ACM and IEEE guidelines executed at the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies (LLU) has been evaluated and compared to similar programs at the University of Ostrava, the University of Malaga and the University of Debrecen. Compliance is evaluated using ACM and IEEE defined knowledge areas that must be included in the curricula, including computing essentials, mathematical and engineering fundamentals, software modelling and analysis, requirements analysis and specification, software design, software verification and validation, software process, software quality and security. The study program knowledge area share compliance with ACM/IEEE guidelines is calculated and association by the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient is presented. The results show that the Latvia University of Life Sciences and Technologies, the University of Debrecen and the University of Ostrava study program design is in compliance with ACM/IEEE guidelines.