A “Future-Proof” Postgraduate Software Engineering Programme: Maintainability Issues

We report on the development of a software engineering programme for Masters students. Maintainability of educational programmes is critical: there is a large initial investment in developing quality programmes and we must ensure that these programmes are “future proof”. Consequently, we followed a traditional software engineering lifecycle process to develop a programme that would meet the current needs of industry, whilst also being easy to maintain with respect to future changes in industrial requirements. We show how the programme has gone through a number of refinement steps — where we have iterated through the life cycle of requirements engineering (with “client” industries), high-level design (establishment of a foundational educational architecture), implementation (by lecturers), testing (through establishment of evaluation and feedback mechanisms) and maintenance (throw updates to curriculum and course content). To conclude, we propose treating educational programmes as software, and demonstrate advantages in applying software engineering techniques for development and maintenance. Keywords-Teaching, Education, Curriculum, Software Engineering