Duke Engineering Creates New Minor and Concentration in Software Engineering

Starting this fall, students across Duke University will have access to a new Minor in Software Engineering that will prepare them to understand and develop new applications in any field.

Operated through Duke Engineering’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE), the minor provides a roadmap to select five courses for students to dive deeply and broadly into software engineering topics.

“This minor isn’t just for engineers; it could work in tandem with just about every area of study at Duke,” said Tyler Bletsch, associate professor of the practice in ECE, who led the faculty committee that developed the minor. “If you use software, artificial intelligence or large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in your line of work, there’s a role for software engineering to play.”

For ECE students interested in software engineering, an ECE-focused variant of this roadmap is available to them as a transcriptable concentration rather than a minor, meaning that the completion of the concentration will be officially notated on their diploma in a similar manner.

Duke ECE’s new software engineering minor and concentration are separate from the recently announced Concentration in Software Engineering and Design through Duke’s Department of Computer Science in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences. Both concentrations are only available to students in their respective majors, however the software engineering minor is open to non-ECE students across all of Duke.

Human Factors of Software Engineering

During the five-course minor or concentration, students will learn about and be challenged in many technical aspects of software engineering. They will also discuss the ethics and human influence on programming in alignment with Duke Engineering’s Character Forward initiative.

LLMs and AI have democratized software and made coding more accessible than ever, but there is still a need for understanding what goes into these programs, especially at larger scales. Although the bits that make up software can’t be biased, the decision making behind them can be.  

“As software engineering evolves with AI and LLMs and becomes more ubiquitous in society, it’s critical we have humans who are able to consider the ethics of software across a variety of fields,” Gustafson said.

The first required course, Foundations in Software Engineering (ECE 495.03 for Fall 2025 and ECE 351 thereafter) was created for this initiative by Afsaneh Rahbar, assistant professor of the practice of ECE. It covers topics such as code reviews and principles of egoless programming. Another class offered in the curriculum is Human-Centered Computing (ECE 653/CS 653), which is taught by Shaundra Daily, the Cue Family Professor of the Practice of ECE, and emphasizes the importance of human-computer interactions and the user experience.