Training Software Engineers – Part 4 – Project-led Teaching

In the final part of this series of posts on Training Software Engineers, having spent time talking about academic curricula and the subjects taught, I want to think about the methods used in educating software engineers and computer scientists. It’s a fairly simple premise: we need to be trained less on tasks which we carry out frequently.

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Training Software Engineers – Part 3 – Aspect-Oriented Teaching

While recently pulling together over 130 hours of video-based training material for software engineers and project managers I was reminded of how regularly a number of key aspects kept cropping up, even as we looked at very different software engineering practices and ideas, like SSADM, UML, BPMN, test driven development, risk management and so on.  In an ideal teaching environment I would love to see these concepts form the backbone of the curriculum, so that a student is effectively able to navigate the course content through following the concepts, while at the same time covering a wide range of topics.

Let’s call this ‘aspect-oriented teaching’ and consider how it might work…

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Training Software Engineers – Part 2 – The Importance of a Balanced Viewpoint

In this second post on how we go about training software engineers, I’ll be considering the point raised by a non-geek friend of mine once. “You computer guys seem to get so protective of the tools you use!” he exclaimed before going on to claim that the French car he drove was so much better than my solid VW! Taking a solid stance on technology use seems to be the norm now for technologists. We choose our platform, tools and so on, and will fight almost to the death to protect our use of them and will evangelise endlessly to any who’ll listen – and many who won’t – about why they’re so much better than those others may use.

Is this really an attitude we should be passing on to future generations of computer scientists?

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Training Software Engineers – Part 1 – Conventional Techniques

I’ve been involved in some significant training programmes over recent months and have come to realise a few things about the way we seem to teach our craft. These experiences are drawn from close to 200 hours of training I’ve delivered, developed or co-presented in the last year, which have ranged in content from ‘traditional’ techniques such as SSADM through to ‘contemporary’ agile and test-driven development. In this first post in the series, I’ll consider the relevance of the more mature approaches to software engineering to those currently learning the profession.

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