Early Progress on Enhancing Existing Software Engineering Courses to Cultivate Performance Awareness

Software engineering and computer science courses are frequently focused on particular areas in a way that neglects such cross-cutting quality attributes as performance, reliability, and security. We will describe the progress we have made in developing enhancements to some of our existing software engineering courses to draw attention and even lay the foundations of an awareness of performance considerations in the software development life cycle. In doing so, we wish to make performance considerations integral to the software engineering mindset while avoiding the need to remove current material from our existing courses. This work is part of an NSF-funded project for undergraduate curriculum development.