This document summarizes a short video presentation about aligning software engineering education with industry needs. It discusses conducting a meta-analysis of 35 previous studies to identify important software engineering skills and knowledge gaps. The results showed that testing and design are slightly more important than development. Topics with high importance and knowledge gaps should be priorities to improve in university programs. The video was recorded on May 12, 2020 for a JSS Happy Hour event on May 29th to discuss questions and answers.

1. 1Vahid Garousi
Online short video for
the JSS “Happy Hour”
To take place on: May 29, 2020
Video was recorded on: May 12, 2020

2. 2Vahid Garousi
Outline
 Context of and Need for this study?
 Research method and review questions
 Results
 Also discussing their implications and benefits

3. 3Vahid Garousi
Context of and Need for this study
 The quality of the software
engineering (SE) workforce is a
direct result of the quality of SE
education, and how SE students are
trained in university programs.
Study software
engineering
Work in the software
industry
Graduate from
university
• To address the above need, many studies (35 papers as of 2018) have
been conducted to “align” SE education with industry’s skill needs.
Each of those studies has focused on a regional and limited-scale
dataset, usually gathered via opinion surveys.
• It is important to synthesize and aggregate the results of all those
studies to provide a single “consolidated” view

4. 4Vahid Garousi
Review questions
 …
 RQ 3- Importance (usefulness) of SE skills:
 Which SE skills (subjects) are the most important and which SE
subjects are the least important for a typical software engineer in
practice? To classify SE topics, we used the SWEBOK (version 3,
2014) which has 13 knowledge areas (KAs)
 RQ 4- Knowledge gaps (deficiencies):
 What is the evidence for knowledge gaps (deficiencies) in different
SE subjects? And what are the topics with the highest knowledge
deficiencies?
 ...
 RQ 8-…

5. 5Vahid Garousi
Pool of studies
 35 papers in total…
1
0 0
2
1
2
0 0 0
1 1
0
2 2 2
1 1 1
3 3
5
2
4
1
0
1
2
3
4
5
6 1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
Num.ofpapers

6. 6Vahid Garousi
Dataset
 List of countries in the paper pool:
 Histogram of the number of data
points in each study:
 When we added up the number of respondents from all
35 studies, the total dataset size was 4,132 data points
(respondents)
Countries Num. of
studies
USA 16
Canada 4
South Africa 4
New Zealand 2
Spain 2
Samoa 1
England 1
Norway 1
Philippines 1
Jordan 1
Netherlands 1
Australia 1
Finland 1
Worldwide 1
560480400320240160800
4
3
2
1
0
Number of data points in each study
Frequency(Numberofstudies)

7. 7Vahid Garousi
Process for data synthesis and meta-analysis
 E.g., For RQ 3- Importance (usefulness) of SE skills
One of the
35 papers in
the pool
SWEBOK (v3, 2014)
13 knowledge areas (KAs)

8. 8Vahid Garousi
Results
 RQ 3- Importance (usefulness) of SE skills:
 Implications: Testing and design are perhaps slightly more important
than development in work-place
20151050
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
Num of papers appeared in
Avgimportance
Mathematical Foundations
Engineering Foundations
Computing Foundations
SE Economics
SE Prof Practice
Quality
SE models and Methods
SE Process
Proj. Management
Config. Mng
Maintenance
Testing
Development
Design
Requirements
All papers (1995-2018) (n=35)

9. 9Vahid Garousi
Results
 RQ 4- Knowledge gaps (deficiencies):
 Implications:
 Topics in Q1 (high importance, high gap) are those which need the highest
attention w.r.t. need for improvements in SE education in university programs.
 They have high importance, and also high knowledge gap.
1.00.80.60.40.20.0
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
Avg. importance
Avg.knowledgegap
Mathematical Foundations
Computing Foundations
SE Prof Practice
Quality
SE models and Methods
SE Process
Proj. Management
Config. Mng
Maintenance
Testing
Development
Design
Requirements
All papers, reporting knowledge gap (1995-2018) (n=8)
High gap
Q1-High importance,
High gap
Q2-Low importance,
Low gap
Q4-Low importance,
Low gap
Q3-High importance,

10. 10Vahid Garousi
Outline: END of the short talk
 Need for this study?
 Research method and review questions
 Results
 Also discussing their implications and benefits
JSS “Happy Hour”
To take place on: May 29, 2020
Looking forward to:
Questions / Answers