Addressing Software's Chronic Crisis in the Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum

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Since its inception, the software industry has languished in a perpetual state of crisis. Academic computer science departments have contributed to this by largely failing in their responsibility to appropriately educate and prepare software professionals. We propose to address this failure with the following three-pronged effort: A comprehensive and integrated four-semester software-development curriculum will be created and installed within the undergraduate computer science programs at The Ohio State University and at West Virginia University. Fundamental to this curriculum is the guiding philosophy that software is properly conceptualized and constructed in terms of carefully engineered reusable software components. A software composition workbench, consisting of an integrated set of software tools, will be developed. The workbench will be capable of guiding and supporting students and software developers in their use and application of the methodologies taught in the software development curriculum. The proposed curriculum and workbench will be rigorously evaluated through content-oriented, performance- oriented, and attitude-oriented studies. Central to this effort will be development of appropriate, longitudinal evaluation instruments for each of the courses in the curriculum and for the workbench. The goal of this project is to create a system capable of producing software professionals with greater awareness and understanding of the technical issues faced by the software industry, and with measurably better software design and development skills.