Software Engineering Dicipline

Since the dawn of computing in the 1940s, the applications and uses of computers have grown at a staggering rate. Software plays a central role in almost all aspects of daily life: in government,banking and finance, education, transportation, entertainment, medicine, agriculture, and law.


The number, size, and application domains of computer programs have grown dramatically; as a result, hundreds of billions are being spent on software development, and the livelihood and lives of most people depend on the effectiveness of this development. Software products have helped us to be more efficient and productive. They make us more effective problem solvers, and they provide us with an environment for work and play that is often safer, more flexible, and less confining. Despite these successes, there are serious problems in the cost, timeliness, and quality of many software products. The reasons for these problems are many and include the following:

• Software products are among the most complex of man-made systems, and software by its very nature has intrinsic, essential properties (e.g., complexity, invisibility,and changeability) that are not easily addressed.
• Programming techniques and processes that worked effectively for an individual or a small team to develop modest-sized programs do not scale-up well to the development of large,complex systems (i.e., systems with millions of lines of code, requiring years of work, by hundreds of software developers).
• The pace of change in computer and software technology drives the demand for new and evolved software products. This situation has created customer expectations and competitive forces that strain our ability to produce quality of software within acceptable development schedules.
  

It has been over thirty-five years since the first organized, formal discussion of software engineering as a discipline took place at the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering [Naur 1969]. The term “software engineering” is now widely used in industry, government, and academia: hundreds of thousands of computing professionals go by the title “software engineer”; numerous publications, groups and organizations, and professional conferences use the term software engineering in their names; and there are many educational courses and programs on software engineering.

However, there are still disagreements and differences of opinion about the meaning of the term. The following definitions provide several views of the meaning and nature of software engineering. Nevertheless, they all possess a common thread, which states, or strongly implies that software engineering is more than just coding - it includes quality, schedule and economics, and the knowledge and application of principles and discipline.