WIP: Better Understanding Software Engineering Practices and Tools in Engineering Education

In this work-in-progress research paper, we present the design and preliminary results of an ongoing thematic analysis of software engineering practices and tools (SEPTs), using Bloom's cognitive taxonomy to analyze the content of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Guide. Our work is motivated by the fact that while the software development process is becoming increasingly important in engineering, software engineering skills are hardly taught in most undergraduate engineering curricula, and existing descriptions of these skills are not easily accessible to educators in many engineering disciplines. We present results from the analysis of the Software Requirements knowledge area, which those outside of computing have characterized as especially important but not well understood. We identified 92 practices and tools in the knowledge area, and found some promise in our approach: our results help highlight key topics within the knowledge area where SEPTs can be especially helpful, such as requirements elicitation, analysis, and change process management, and provide further clarity on SEPTs from prior work that may be helpful to engineering educators. Though our current findings do not cover the extent to which our identified SEPTs are accessible to those outside of engineering, we are optimistic that our work helps a broader range of engineering educators identify SEPTs that might be underutilized in their engineering practice, and the depth to which they might teach these SEPTs in their curricula. Our work is thus an important first step in addressing the gap between how we teach students to develop software in undergraduate engineering programs and how practitioners in the field develop software.