Best MSc in Software Development

FUBARED

Hi,

Any opinions on which is currently the best MSc in Software Development program in Ireland.

I've over 10 years experience in the software industry (...mainly Java and some recent management experience). I am exploring options to do a full time masters to brush up my skill set.

Would like to hear other peoples opinion on the various courses available in Uni's and IT's. Has anybody any experience or recommendations for a specific course.
Not interested in a glorified conversion course, already done a Grad Dip 15 years ago.
Would like to find something that covers current technology areas and software development practices, and is well recognized by prospective employers.

Any thoughts?

Useful.Idiot

These are just from my personal (undergraduate) opinion but here's two that come to mind.

This is a relatively new interesting one in DIT and AIT. Fees are paid, it includes a paid internship and it offers support for certification exams as well as providing you with a bursary. However upon successful completion you are tied into a permanent contract position with the sponsoring company. It seems to be more of a skills gap bridging masters for computing graduates and those who have converted to IT from other disciplines rather than a more specialised masters in a particular area in computing but it is meant to be very intensive.

Link is a year old but the content of the degree seems relatively unchanged since:
http://www.ictirelandskillnet.org/uploads/MAST%20Programme%202012%20fin%20AITDIT.pdf

Trinity's Msc in Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing seems to be a really interesting one too and I would imagine it would have a great reputation with employers.
https://www.scss.tcd.ie/postgraduate/mobile-ubiquitous-computing/

ChRoMe

FUBARED wrote: »

Hi,

Any opinions on which is currently the best MSc in Software Development program in Ireland.

I've over 10 years experience in the software industry (...mainly Java and some recent management experience). I am exploring options to do a full time masters to brush up my skill set.

Would like to hear other peoples opinion on the various courses available in Uni's and IT's. Has anybody any experience or recommendations for a specific course.
Not interested in a glorified conversion course, already done a Grad Dip 15 years ago.
Would like to find something that covers current technology areas and software development practices, and is well recognized by prospective employers.

Any thoughts?

Ten years experience and you are considering a masters? Its really going to provide you very little value considering the level you are already at.

Wrexis

I did CIT's MSc in Software Development 2010-2012. I enjoyed it a lot and it opened a lot of doors in my career.

Advantages

• I learned a lot about Software Quality and Software Engineering processes, great lecturers.
• If you're passionate about a project they'll let you do it, but you need to show it.

Disadvantages

• The course is overly academic in certain areas and naive of how software works in the real world.
• Many lecturers will only except work in Java, so if you do something in Python/.NET or anything that doesn't work easily it may not be approved.
• Some lectures are outdated. Java RMI and CORBA are still being taught or referenced, but nothing was mentioned of say, REST web services.

In general I found it worth it, but time consuming. It's a 2 year course, with 2 - 3 nights a week of classes from 6pm to 9pm. I found it challenging without kids, I know that some of my colleagues had to do a lot of family juggling to get it done.

CreepingDeath

FUBARED wrote: »

Would like to find something that covers current technology areas and software development practices, and is well recognized by prospective employers.

Any thoughts?

The higher up you get in management the less technology you need to know, unless you want to move into a software architect career path.

So it all depends on the career path you want.
Since you mention "recent management experience", then project management, agile development/management, budgeting, continuous integration testing, software proposals and introducing processes to the development cycle would seem to be the way to go.

No point in learning the details of EJB 3 if you want to become a development manager. It won't hurt to know the basics, but you'll be delegating the tricky bits to more technical people.

regards,
CD

fergalr

FUBARED wrote: »

Hi,

Any opinions on which is currently the best MSc in Software Development program in Ireland.

I've over 10 years experience in the software industry (...mainly Java and some recent management experience). I am exploring options to do a full time masters to brush up my skill set.

Would like to hear other peoples opinion on the various courses available in Uni's and IT's. Has anybody any experience or recommendations for a specific course.
Not interested in a glorified conversion course, already done a Grad Dip 15 years ago.
Would like to find something that covers current technology areas and software development practices, and is well recognized by prospective employers.

Any thoughts?

Its hard to answer without knowing more about you.

If you have a solid undergrad in the area,, and you've been following technology as you have done your 10 years experience - then I'd wonder how much you'd get out of a taught MSc.

I think the reality is that most of the Irish CS MSc are partially serving as conversion courses. Further, if you want to learn about practical applied software engineering, thats just not something that universities are traditionally great at teaching - its sort of outside their area of expertise.

Depending on how much you've done, maybe check out this course in UCD - there are some smart people involved in it - maybe you can tell from the syllabus how much you'd learn from it.
http://www.csi.ucd.ie/content/msc-advanced-software-engineering

It at least isn't aiming to cater directly to the conversion-course crowd, as it requires 2 years experience, and it is software engineering focused. But whether you'll learn more in it, or faster, than you would independently, given your considerable experience, is more down to you, than about the course.
I did TA for a module given in it a year or two back, and there were definitely some smart students in the class.


There's also the issue of what your career goals are, as you asked how well employers would consider an MSc. Thats a hard question to answer.

Are you currently employed in software? If so, where do you want to go for the rest of your career? If you want to get very technical, and have a lot of software eng experience, maybe consider a qualification in maths or stats or analytics instead - that might be more worth your time than a CS MSc. On the other hand, if you see yourself going down the management route, have you considered whether you'd be better off with an MBA?; or even just courses on project management; if you are aiming to be in management one or both of those might be more useful in the medium term - I can't advise, it all depends...


If you just want to learn new things, out of intellectual curiosity, or to sharpen your skills, there's some pretty good individual courses on offer on youtube these days, or on some of the coursera courses. You can honestly probably find hotter stuff on there than you are going to get taught on average in Irish universities, if you can find a brand new course in an area of particular interest to you.

You could consider doing a research MSc instead, if you want to go deep towards the cutting edge in a particular discipline, maybe you want to get into data analytics etc. It all depends.