Recently, a stellar group of software engineering professionals from industry, academia, and government came together to develop a dynamic new curriculum model titled Graduate Software Engineering 2009 (GSwE2009). College degrees in software engineering were offered in the late 1970s; computer professionals were educated at the master’s level. The first major curriculum model was written by Mark Ardis and Gary Ford and published by the Software Engineering Institute in 1989. In this article, several of the GSwE2009 developers, including Ardis, provide an overview of the new model, which was subsequently endorsed by the ACM and IEEE Computer Society.

The article begins with a brief history of software engineering education and reasons why it was necessary to update the 1989 model. Next, the GSwE2009 project team’s guiding principles and expected student outcomes are discussed. This leads to the development of a core body of knowledge, which is shown in relation to the rest of the model in both text and figures. A major difference between the old and the new model is the inclusion of systems engineering as a much larger component of the latter’s guidelines. Finally, the article outlines the process used to develop GSwE2009, and discusses the future of the project.

I highly recommend this well-written and timely article to all those both inside and outside of academia who are concerned about the graduate education of software engineering professionals.