Source control, continuous integration, automatic testing. All of those things you might learn on a software engineering course but for some reason were conspicuously absent on my CS course.
Despite a trend for some colleges to teach computer science as software engineering (my college included..), they should be considered two different things. However, they're not. So we usually wind up with a mix that is some CS, some SE and satisfies very few people.
Agreed. I think most universities would rather err on the side of CS, lest they be construed as something like a trade school. Unfortunately, that doesn't mesh well with the reality that the majority of students will go into software engineering, not computer science. It's clearly difficult to serve the divergent goals of teaching people core abstract concepts, while still adequately preparing them for a career.
In most of my "CS" classes, it was sort of assumed that tools like version control, test suites, etc were just part of getting things done, and they were up to you to learn on your own time. Lots of TAs/LAs had quick tutorials to teach things like CVS and the like, but it wasn't really considered course material. The same was true for processes/development models, and for tools in other areas of engineering, like Solidworks, SPICE, etc.
My university's CS & Soft Eng courses had them, but they were bullet points in the curriculum that the lecturers were neither interested in nor competent with.
So, source control meant "use RCS on your local machine for one assignment (individual, not group work.)"
Automatic testing meant writing some scripts that produced specified predictable results, for the lecturers to run the assignments against. No result verification, no structure, no test design, definitely no TDD.
Continuous integration was simply missing, although this was seven or eight years ago so I guess it was a newish concept back then.
I think teaching them half-assed like this is even worse than not teaching them at all. Students' initial impressions are that version control is a waste of time and that testing is pointless busywork, best done at the end.
It seems like those attitudes can persist well into many working programmers' careers.
