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The Carnegie Mellon West part-time software engineering master’s program prepares experienced software engineers for technical leadership roles in software development organizations.
 Development Management Track: As a graduate of this program track, you will be able to effectively plan and manage software engineering projects that require a thorough understanding of the software development lifecycle, from requirements capture to deployment.
Within the track, you will learn how to align software engineering decisions with your company’s business goals and to develop the communication, teamwork, and negotiation skills needed to be an effective technical leader.
Curriculum
Working in a team to plan and produce releases of complex software applications, you act as an employee of a fictional company. Faculty members provide guidance and coaching as you apply methods and concepts from assigned readings and develop task-specific work products. Team members collaborate in planning, decision-making, and execution. Most courses include seminar discussions, simulated work scenarios, and a formal presentation of a team proposal to faculty members in addition to delivering work products for each task within the course. Each course offers an appropriate balance of individual and team work.
New Student Orientation
The MS in Software Engineering program starts with a required four-day orientation one week prior to the start of the program. This exciting event gives you the opportunity to get to know your classmates and faculty members, prepares you for the rigors of your first course, and creates an environment in which you begin the process of building strong team dynamics.
First Year Courses
Foundations of Software Engineering (14 weeks)
You learn and apply foundational concepts in teamwork, requirements management, and design techniques using an agile method to develop the next release of an existing software application, building on a legacy code base.
Requirements Engineering (14 weeks)
Your team interacts with stakeholders to elicit and formalize requirements for a new software product. You employ systematic modeling and analysis methods as well as flexible, user-oriented prototyping techniques to clarify both the functional and non-functional requirements.
Architecture (14 weeks)
You investigate several distinct architectural styles used in software products and evaluate the suitability of these styles for your own product. You make high-level design decisions about your product’s components and their interactions and evaluate how well your decisions meet functional and non-functional requirements.
 Second-Year Courses Elements of Software Management (7 weeks)
Through seminar discussions, collaborative practice, and individual investigation, you assess real software businesses from marketing, business strategy, financial, and overall business perspectives, applying fundamental methods, models, and frameworks. This course concludes with a presentation of your two-year business prognosis for a selected software business. Throughout the course, students are also coached on effective business communication.
Metrics for Software Managers (7 weeks)
As a member of a team, you analyze and propose metrics initiatives for fictional software organizations with specific software management problems, aligning the initiatives with business and stakeholder goals. The process of analyzing these realistic business situations includes gaining a basic understanding of the software management approach and addressing issues related to the organization’s adoption of the proposed metric initiative.
Project and Process Management (7 weeks)
Your project team establishes a business case for a new software project, describing project goals and success criteria with limited time and information. You recommend an appropriate software development process to senior managers after analyzing alternative approaches.
Managing Software Professionals (7 weeks)
You and your project team address a series of issues related to coordinating and managing the various tasks associated with a distributed software development project. In this context, you consider a variety of issues related to hiring, retention, and dismissal of employees, as well as cultural considerations of managing a diverse team.
The Gathering
After the second and fourth semesters, all students return to campus for a weekend of co-curricular learning opportunities, skill enhancement, team-building exercises, and fun. The program focuses on activities that continue to build a strong sense of community as well as team and individual growth exercises.
Electives*
Management of Outsourced Development (14 weeks)
Your project team analyzes the business rationale, risks, and benefits for outsourcing some or all of a new software project and presents its recommendations for outsourcing to senior managers. Your analysis includes which tasks should be outsourced, how to select suppliers, and how to manage the outsourced work effectively.
| Recent Practicums |
- SAP - RFID for asset tracking
- Wind River - Vital signs monitor for embedded systems
- CommerceNet - MicroFormats
- Noveau Systems - Scripting for a P2P workflow
- Panasonic Research - Peer-to-Peer distributed agent standard
- CMU Robotic Institute - Robotic diaries
- Nokia – “Your office anywhere, everywhere”
- TopCoder – Mobile RSS Reader
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Practicum (14 weeks)
You work in a small team to apply what you have learned to a real-world business problem. Diverse organization and business clients sponsor the software projects and work actively with the team to ensure successful completion. Your team negotiates the plans, schedules, and deliverables with high standards for software management approaches, accountability, and teamwork.
Innovation and Entrepreneurship (14 weeks)
You will work in small teams, advised by experienced venture capitalists and facilitated by other industry experts, to master the elements of entrepreneurship in the context of a business plan competition. Your team evaluates cases, meets with business leaders, and refines a business plan. The winning team receives a significant cash prize, and selected plans may be submitted to external business plan competitions.
Software Product Marketing (7 weeks)
Your team develops a marketing plan for a new software product or service, identifying programs needed to support the cost-effective launch and ongoing marketing activities for the software. Teams define the product positioning and the product marketing initiatives, including pricing, channel management, service agreements, product collateral, sales, marketing communications, and partnerships.
Enterprise Architecture (7 weeks)
As part of an architecture team, you propose and evaluate architectural alternatives for software systems, including both packaged and SaaS applications. Your study includes integration mechanisms, inclusion of pre-built components, and adherence to standards to satisfy a given set of business, technical, and functional requirements.
Human-Computer Interaction (7 weeks)
Your team develops and evaluates an interaction design for a software product, learning to use a range of tools and techniques. You model users using personas and scenarios, create an interaction design framework, develop low- and high-fidelity prototypes, and then apply usability inspection and usability testing methods to validate design decisions.
Open Source Software (7 weeks)
You acquire fundamental skills and awareness of recent technical and business issues regarding open source software. Emphasis is on understanding the impact of open source software on the software industry including licensing and commercialization issues, corporate software evaluation techniques, and business models.
Other Master's Programs
* Electives offerings are based upon student demand and faculty availability.
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