Courseware development and software engineering

This paper examines aspects of the notion that courseware can be successfully engineered in the way that, we are told, software is engineered. Over the past twenty years software development has used the paradigm of engineering and the analogy with traditional engineering to give it focus and direction. Recently the engineering paradigm has been grafted onto the development of courseware. This paper looks at the validity of this approach and asks at what level should the comparison be made between software engineering and courseware engineering. In particular the paper considers the current use of some software engineering ideas to enhance the quality of courseware products and to manage and control their development. These are the areas where the engineering analogy is less useful. In software engineering terms, courseware engineering seems to lack clarity or consistency in defining its customers, and in defining the purpose, scope and boundary of its products, leading to problems in subsequent testing and evaluation. In managing the developmental process, courseware engineering often resorts to informal incremental prototyping. In software engineering terms, this lacks the visibility that would facilitate many aspects of management. The paper concludes by offering a courseware lifecycle development and deployment model that addresses these issues and maps well into current practice in modularised higher education and the needs of undergraduate computer science education.