Abstract:

The world of software engineering is dynamically changing over the last decade. Providing adequate university education is one of the key goals of the academic community and the authors, as team members of Informatics department in Burgas Free University, are highly motivated to ensure advanced and up-to-date students' training. One direction in achieving this ambitious goal is to constantly monitor the trends in IT sector and by strategic planning of the curricula and programs to achieve competitiveness in the education services market.

A reliable source of information is the data from the annual survey on technology and programming languages, as well as on preferred learning methods and ways to enhance competencies, conducted among Stack Overflow users since 2011. The number of respondents in this survey increase over the years reaching almost 99 000 participants in 2018. The main purpose is to gather and summarize information from software developers about their understanding of the surrounding world of technology. In addition, the survey helps employers determine what professionals are on the market and what their interests are. The poll, on the basis of which the survey is conducted, contains over 150 questions, divided into 8 main categories, the questions in two of the categories being assigned to all respondents, and the rest are filtered on the basis of previous answers. Questions are related to: the used technologies, job search and salary, education and professional development, software development practices, hardware knowledge and other skills. Survey data is publicly available in a CSV file and can be downloaded.

Тhis article outlines the some of the tendencies in Software Engineering Education, e.g. in the used programming languages, in salaries and gender dependencies, and as a result several changes in the curricula of the Department of Informatics and Computer Science are proposed.

Keywords:

Software engineering education, programming languages, university software education.