Software engineering is not the answer (Score 1)

I recently left acedemia and entered the real world. One thing that immediately blew my mind was Agile development techniques. My old software engineering text has about two paragraphs on iterative or evolutionary development, but that is the closest that it came. I had one professor who encouraged us to write tests for our software, but never really showed us how. Now I don't feel comfortable writing code without a failing test. Everything they taught us in school was about big design up front. This might be fine if you are writing code that you will never have to maintain for a quick school project. However, in the industry it seems to be a pretty risky approach.

I would suggest that anyone who is preparing to enter the industry should study up on Agile development processes. There is a major paradigm shift happening now. The time that you spend learning traditional software engineering will more than likely be wasted effort.