On the education of future software engineers

The education of software engineering students more and more addresses enterprise-oriented organizational and management issues, like for instance modeling the business structure and environment of the enterprise which will receive a new software system. The teaching of business modeling technologies based on standards like UML and the Rational Unified Process raises novel questions that need to be addressed. Business modeling consists in modeling, organizations and their workfiows; in several cases the modeling can be complemented by business simulation. This paper presents as a case study some Agent-Based Simulation tools for modeling the enterprise dynamics, and shows how we exploited them to teach an Organizational Software Engineering laboratory course, providing students with Software Engineering skills along with Agent-Based Simulation principles.