Software Engineering Education for Technical Engineering Degrees and its Specific Needs

Software engineering is no longer only an important subject in the education of computer science degree programs to train traditional software engineers, but made its way into a number of technical engineering degrees. Software engineering education, there, takes a vital part in preparing future engineers in developing highly specialized software in various domains. One example is robotics, we currently see a rise in industry's need for well-educated roboticists, which is reflected in an increasing number of robotics degree programs. In these programs, students are trained to develop individual software-based applications for standardized robotics hardware. In addition, students need to be able to blend into bigger software engineering programs considering IoT applications. Therefore, software engineering is an important part of students' education. However, due to other important fields to be taught during their studies (e.g., electrical engineering, mechanical engineering), it is impossible to teach all software engineering related aspects as is part of a software engineering. In addition, students are missing basic knowledge from lower semester computer science subjects, which are not part of these technical degree programs as well. Therefore, there is a need to define a software engineering curriculum for these technical engineering degree programs that provides students with sufficient software engineering knowledge and skills.