The software engineering community aims to educate tomorrow’s leaders and innovators who research and develop software solutions in the context of a sustainable society and a smarter planet. Powerful forces, including demographics, challenging economic landscape, knowledge economy, internationalization, rapidly evolving technologies, sustainable development, and resource limitations require significant changes in the role of universities in society. These forces present big challenges and huge opportunities for software engineering to exhibit leadership in designing the changes that will shape our future. 

As a responsibility to our society it is critical that our community meets the challenges of the software engineering profession. All over the world, there is an increasing demand for highly qualified software engineers. We need to devote an increasing amount of time and energy to both the training of new software engineers and the continuing education of practitioners. This problem is exacerbated because the first generation of software engineering leaders and educators is nearing retirement age. The goal of the ICSE 2012 software engineering education track is to analyze and discuss these challenges to software engineering education. 

We solicit contributions from the software engineering community dealing with problems, questions, issues, and innovative solutions in teaching software engineering. We solicit high-quality papers on software engineering education in two categories: (1) Full papers, up to 10 pages, documenting well-articulated and well-established results and findings; and (2) Short papers, up to 4 pages, describing new ideas and results that may not have been fully validated yet, but are worth sharing with the community. Topics include but are not limited to: 

• Given the global shortage of software engineers, how do we educate as many young people as possible with a long lasting set of knowledge and abilities about the engineering of software?
• How can we provide continuing education for practitioners? Do they need special treatment, or can we use the same lectures and projects that we provide for students? Do practitioners need exams and degrees?
• How do we generate faculty positions during economic downturns to replace the first generations of software engineering leaders and educators?
• Software has fundamental impact on society. How should we address ethical and cultural societal issues effectively? How should we teach organizational and cultural issues effectively?
• How should projects and theory be integrated in software engineering courses? How should we integrate the topics of smarter planet, sustainable development, and resource limitations into software engineering curricula?
• There is a large variety of tools and frameworks for software development, but any curriculum can address only a few of them. How much time and energy should be devoted to this moving target?
• Software engineering is about collaboration in an increasingly distributed, multi-site fashion. What is the impact of linguistic differences? How do we teach the skills required in multi-site projects effectively?
• Attrition in first year is a significant problem. How can we address this problem in software engineering programs? Are there fundamental issues related to programming languages, software tools, and infrastructure? Should software engineers take a more active role in teaching first year programming?
• What are the implications of the Bologna accord—a European revolution with global implications—with respect to software engineering education?

Paper submission: October 27, 2011

Notification: January 27, 2011

Camera ready version: March 16, 2012

SEE Education Track: June 6-8, 2012

Gerardo Canfora, University of Sannio, Italy

Ivica Crnkovic, Professor, Mälardalen University, Sweden

Shihong Huang, Florida Atlantic University, USA

Mira Kajko-Mattsson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Rick Kazman, University of Hawaii, USA

Michele Lanza, University of Lugano, Switzerland

Richard LeBlanc, Seattle University, USA

Tim Lethbridge, University of Ottawa, Canada

Claus Lewerentz, Technische Universität Cottbus, Germany

Grace Lewis, SEI, USA

Jeff Magee, Imperial College, UK

Leon Moonen, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway

Martin Naedele, ABB Research, Switzerland

Claudia Raibulet, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Ita Richardson, Lero-Irish Software Engineering Research, Ireland

Kurt Schneider, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

Alberto Sillitti, Free University Bolzano, Italy

Ian Sommerville, St Andrews University, Scotland

João Pedro Sousa, George Mason University, USA

Paul Strooper, University of Queensland, Australia

Kenny Wong, University of Alberta, Canada