2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite the increasing importance of working with and developing software in numerous engineering fields, engineering education today largely focuses on programming, rather than software engineering practices and tools (SEPTs), that is, the tools and techniques for designing, implementing, and maintaining software over time. As a result, the productivity or reliability of engineering work involving software can be hampered by problems that could have been avoided with the use of modern best practices in software engineering. Despite a history of research on SEPTs in computing fields (e.g., computer science and software engineering) and computational science fields (e.g., computational physics and bioinformatics), the use of SEPTs in engineering fields is not well understood.

To address this problem, in this paper, we present ongoing work investigating how practitioners and undergraduate students in non-computing engineering disciplines understand and use SEPTs. Specifically, we present the preliminary design of a qualitative study, including a survey instrument to assess familiarity with software engineering terminology and use of SEPTs. Our survey is based on the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) Guide, which outlines a generally accepted, standard body of knowledge expected of practicing early-career software engineers. We design the survey to be accessible even to those unfamiliar with the specific software engineering terminology used in the SWEBOK Guide. In addition to the survey itself, we describe our planned approach to conduct a thematic analysis of participants’ responses, using the taxonomy of the SWEBOK Guide as an analytical framework.

We hope that our study will help illuminate the landscape of how different engineering disciplines understand and develop software. While we intend for our survey to be used in studying engineers in non-computing fields, we anticipate that the results of our study will inform the development of further research to investigate SEPT use in engineering in a discipline-specific or discipline-agnostic manner. In the broader context, we expect that these insights will help us more identify and teach key SEPTs in undergraduate engineering education, and thereby help future engineers write and maintain software more effectively, whatever their discipline.