Strategies for Industrial Relevance in Software Engineering Education

This paper presents a collection of experiences related to success factors in graduate and postgraduate education. The experiences are mainly concerned with how to make the education relevant from an industrial viewpoint. This is emphasized as a key issue in software engineering education and research, as the main objective is to give the students a good basis for large-scale software development in an industrial environment. The presentation is divided into experiences at the graduate and postgraduate levels, respectively. For each level a number of strategies to achieve industrial relevance are presented. On the graduate level a course in large-scale software development is described to exemplify how industrial relevance can be achieved on the graduate level. The strategies on the postgraduate level have been successful, but it is concluded that more can be done regarding industrial collaboration in the planning and conduction of experiments and case studies. Another interesting strategy for the future is a special postgraduate program for people employed in industry.