Software Assurance in Academia

摘要

There is a great need in industry to mitigate the risks and threats that our computer infrastructure faces. The answer is to incorporate a better strategy of software assurance within the development process. This requires knowledge and skills that is not offered to many college level students. A software assurance course offered at a university was observed and evaluated on the course content and the learning strategy. The content was compared to the Software Assurance: A Curriculum Guide to the Common Body of Knowledge to Produce, Sustain, and Acquire Software. The course content focuses on security principles and vulnerabilities in coding. The laboratory exercises require students to develop an application, learn formalized testing methods, and then evaluate and fix the vulnerabilities found from the testing methods. The course was very effective in teaching students the importance of software assurance. The observation of the course found that with additional areas added to the course content a well rounded course in software assurance could be offered to students.