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From the Editors: Software development in universities



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April 1, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Computer science programs at universities around the world are said to fail to teach students the practical skills they need to deal with on-the-job issues as software developers. That’s not new or unique to our field: The gap between academia and jobs plagues every field from medicine to law. Computer science is no different.

Still, we are glad to see positive examples of increased alignment between the world of academics and the world of software development and engineering. In one example, the Outercurve Foundation has accepted the Microsoft ChronoZoom project, which deals with teaching students how to manage an open-source project and how to work on managing a community and growing a brand new Web application, with third-party application acceptance.

The Outercurve Foundation is a non-profit organization launched by Microsoft in 2009, under the original name of CodePlex, with a stated goal to promote sharing code between companies and open-source communities.

The ChronoZoom Project, supported and funded by Microsoft Research to visualize “the history of everything,” will also help students learn how to work in a distributed team, something that we know is common across the enterprise. The teams are located at Moscow State University, University of California, Berkeley, and other colleges.

Separately—and about as far, philosophically, from Microsoft’s initiatives as can be imagined—the Free Software Foundation has launched an initiative, the Education Team, to bring open-source software to schools and universities so that students can learn how to manipulate code and support projects.

These initiatives help a younger generation of developers, engineers and innovators think about the way projects are built early on. Projects like these help companies hire ready-to-work software developers instead of graduates who have impressive degrees but no real practical training.

We’ve also brought you the story, in past issues and on SDTimes.com, about the software craftsmanship and apprenticeship movement. There’s also New York City’s new Academy for Software Engineering, a high school that will not only teach students how to program, but also how to understand the trends in software and technology.



Related Search Term(s): Bug Labs, ChronoZoom, education, Ford, OpenXC, Outercurve

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