There is a great need in industry to mitigate the risks and threats that our computer infrastructure faces. The answer is to incorporate a better strategy of software assurance within the development process. This requires knowledge and skills that is not offered to many college level students. A software assurance course offered at a university was observed and evaluated on the course content and the learning strategy. The content was compared to the Software Assurance: A Curriculum Guide to the Common Body of Knowledge to Produce, Sustain, and Acquire Software. The course content focuses on security principles and vulnerabilities in coding. The laboratory exercises require students to develop an application, learn formalized testing methods, and then evaluate and fix the vulnerabilities found from the testing methods. The course was very effective in teaching students the importance of software assurance. The observation of the course found that with additional areas added to the course content a well rounded course in software assurance could be offered to students.

Software assurance is not a new discipline, but industry is expressing a need for a stronger knowledge of and improved skills in software assurance. Poor quality software is a serious problem that continues to grow.This requires a skill that few professionals can provide. Training and education are important factors to increase knowledge and skill. Software assurance topics in academia are limited, so there is a need for additional research on the subject. This research focuses on the need for software assurance topics in academia. The results identified the gap of knowledge in the education of software assurance. Important software assurance concepts have been disregarded in the college curriculum leaving industry struggling for skilled professionals. These concepts are identified and must be incorporated into a college curriculum to close the gap.A comparison was made to analyze the topics that are not discussed in academia. The comparison between computing curricula and the Software Assurance: A Curriculum Guide to the Common Body of Knowledge to Produce, Sustain, and Acquire Software (CBK) resulted in a guide of topics to be addressed in academia. The CBK was not entirely addressed in any of the computing curriculum. The topics that were poorly covered in the computing curricula were identified and categorized. These results should be the primary topics incorporated into computer courses and utilized in the development of new software assurance courses.