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Wanted: Embry-Riddle Software Engineers

The good news is that companies hungry for people qualified to solve their software development problems know where to look. The bad news is that the University is having trouble keeping its students from accepting salary offers of up to $80,000 and "going pro" before they complete their master's degree in software engineering (MSE).

Anna Ceberio-Verghese was two classes away from her MSE degree at Embry-Riddle's campus in Daytona Beach, Fla., and working as an intern with Motorola in nearby Boynton Beach when she accepted the company's offer of a full-time job in Chicago. "I had to turn down eight other offers to take it," she says. She eventually completed her degree through the University's independent studies program.

Since the MSE program began in 1994, approximately 90 students have enrolled, but only 18 have completed their degree program, according to Iraj Hirmanpour, chairman of computer science at the University. "For us, this is probably not a good thing," he says, "but the fact that companies are willing to grab our students before they finish shows how good the program is."

The aggressive recruitment of students like Ceberio-Verghese is being driven by a growing dependence on computer software and a need to get new products and services to market as quickly as possible, industry sources say. Companies want software development to take place quickly, in an orderly fashion, and with managers having a firm idea of costs and time frames. However, traditional approaches to software development - programmers working feverishly in isolation - make that scenario very difficult.

"When we hire folks out of normal computer science programs we find that they aren't ready to put together a high quality software product," says Glenn Rosander, an engineering process manager with Harris Corp. in Rochester, N.Y. His company is attracted to software engineering students' discipline and high level of training, he says. "That's worth a lot of money because we don't have to train them."

Embry-Riddle is in an exclusive partnership with Carnegie Mellon University's prestigious Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to test and teach the software engineering technology being created there and introduce it to academia. Both universities conducted a workshop on Embry-Riddle's Daytona Beach campus to show other faculty how to use the SEI models in their teaching.

The "edge up" in future software development will go to those who embrace engineering discipline and standards like those being created at SEI, according to Shahryar Shaghaghi, a senior manager with Andersen Consulting, in Dallas, Texas.

One key to the SEI approach is the Personal Software Process, by which individual engineers define, formalize, and document what they do so that all those working on a project can function as a team. Another is the Capability Maturity Model for industry, which guides software designers through a project and gives them tools for testing and improving the process as the work proceeds.

The new standards are also controversial, says Hirmanpour. "We are doing things differently than before. Sometimes managers don't see the benefits right away."

A software engineer's three goals are to produce software on time, within budget, and with good quality, he says, and "those using the Capability Maturity Model show they're doing a better job of achieving quality."

"Industry today just doesn't have time to wait for programs to be written that may not do the job without a lot of tweaking, and may be too long in the writing," says Ted Powers Jr., a graduate of Embry-Riddle's MSE program and the director of the university's software center. He says projects costing millions of dollars sometimes have been abandoned because developers were ignorant of how the software would work in real life.

The software center that Powers heads up functions as both a teaching laboratory and a software development enterprise in which students work with industry customers on actual projects.

Some projects Embry-Riddle computer science students have developed:

• An air traffic control tutoring system that incorporates on-screen simulation of air traffic situations.
• A desktop flight simulator for a national software marketing company.
• A flight information system that schedules Embry-Riddle's student pilots, instructors and aircraft.
• With Lockheed Martin, a testing process to be used with an air traffic control flight data system.

Paul Wood, project engineer in air traffic management for Lockheed Martin in St. Paul, Minn., says his company has hired at least five Embry-Riddle software engineering students, "and they are gems."

Like many large companies, Lockheed Martin works on huge projects that are beyond the capacity of a single programmer. As many as 150 programmers may be working at one time on defense-related projects involving millions of lines of code, Wood says.

"Before any code is laid down, a lot of planning, structuring, and decision-making must be done about what each piece of the software is going to do," Wood says. "Embry-Riddle graduates understand that process."

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