Industry/University Software Engineering Collaborations for the Successful Reeducation of Non-Software Professionals

Production of software is growing at a phenomenal rate worldwide. In addition, the increasingly global business climate has accelerated the need for business software. An inadequate number of software engineers exist to produce and maintain software to meet this demand. One possible solution to correcting this shortfall is reeducating existing non-software employees to become software engineers. For the past two years, the Industry/University (I/U) subgroup of the Working Group on Software Engineering Education and Training (WGSEET) has been investigating active collaborations between companies and universities in which employees without formal software education are reeducated to become software engineers. This paper reports on our findings by discussing our approach to the investigation, outlining the factors involved in successful collaboration construction and execution, and describing alumni views of the knowledge and skills transferred by the collaboration.