Software engineering

The Airbus A380 uses a substantial amount of software to create a "paperless" cockpit.

Software engineering (SE) is a profession dedicated to designing, implementing, and modifying software so that it is of higher quality, more affordable, maintainable, and faster to build. It is a "systematic approach to the analysis, design, assessment, implementation, test, maintenance and re-engineering of a software by applying engineering to the software".  The term software engineering first appeared in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference, and was meant to provoke thought regarding the perceived "software crisis" at the time. Since the field is still relatively young compared to its sister fields of engineering, there is still much debate around what software engineering actually is, and if it conforms to the classical definition of engineering. The IEEE Computer Society's Software Engineering Body of Knowledge defines "software engineering" as the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software.It is the application of Engineering to software because it integrates significant mathematics, computer science and practices whose origins are in Engineering.

Software development, a much used and more generic term, does not necessarily subsume the engineering paradigm. Although it is questionable what impact it has had on actual software development over the last more than 40 years, the field's future looks bright according to Money Magazine and Salary.com, who rated "software engineering" as the best job in the United States in 2006.

History

Main article: History of software engineering

When the first modern digital computers appeared in the early 1940s, the instructions to make them operate were wired into the machine. Practitioners quickly realized that this design was not flexible and came up with the "stored program architecture" or von Neumann architecture. Thus the first division between "hardware" and "software" began with abstraction being used to deal with the complexity of computing.

Programming languages started to appear in the 1950s and this was also another major step in abstraction. Major languages such as Fortran, ALGOL, and COBOL were released in the late 1950s to deal with scientific, algorithmic, and business problems respectively. E.W. Dijkstra wrote his seminal paper, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", in 1968 and David Parnas introduced the key concept of modularity and information hiding in 1972 to help programmers deal with the ever increasing complexity of software systems. A software system for managing the hardware called an operating system was also introduced, most notably by Unix in 1969. In 1967, the Simula language introduced the object-oriented programming paradigm.

These advances in software were met with more advances in computer hardware. In the mid 1970s, the microcomputer was introduced, making it economical for hobbyists to obtain a computer and write software for it. This in turn led to the now famous Personal Computer (PC) and Microsoft Windows. The Software Development Life Cycle or SDLC was also starting to appear as a consensus for centralized construction of software in the mid 1980s. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the introduction of several new Simula-inspired object-oriented programming languages, including Smalltalk, Objective-C, and C++.

Open-source software started to appear in the early 90s in the form of Linux and other software introducing the "bazaar" or decentralized style of constructing software. Then the World Wide Web and the popularization of the Internet hit in the mid 90s, changing the engineering of software once again. Distributed systems gained sway as a way to design systems, and the Java programming language was introduced with its own virtual machine as another step in abstraction. Programmers collaborated and wrote the Agile Manifesto, which favored more lightweight processes to create cheaper and more timely software.

The current definition of software engineering is still being debated by practitioners today as they struggle to come up with ways to produce software that is "cheaper, better, faster". Cost reduction has been a primary focus of the IT industry since the 1990s. Total cost of ownership represents the costs of more than just acquisition. It includes things like productivity impediments, upkeep efforts, and resources needed to support infrastructure.

Profession

Main article: Software engineer

Legal requirements for the licensing or certification of professional software engineers vary around the world. In the UK, the British Computer Society licenses software engineers and members of the society can also become Chartered Engineers (CEng), while in some areas of Canada, such as Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, software engineers can hold the Professional Engineer (P.Eng)designation and/or the Information Systems Professional (I.S.P.) designation; however, there is no legal requirement to have these qualifications. In Israel a person with an appropriate engineering degree has the right to be listed in Israel's Registry of Engineers and Architects, and Israeli engineering law says that a person calling themselves an engineer without the proper license / registration could be sentenced to up to 6 months in jail.

The IEEE Computer Society and the ACM, the two main professional organizations of software engineering, publish guides to the profession of software engineering. The IEEE's Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge - 2004 Version, or SWEBOK, defines the field and describes the knowledge the IEEE expects a practicing software engineer to have. The IEEE also promulgates a "Software Engineering Code of Ethics".

Employment

In 2004, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 760,840 software engineers holding jobs in the U.S.; in the same time period there were some 1.4 million practitioners employed in the U.S. in all other engineering disciplines combined.Due to its relative newness as a field of study, formal education in software engineering is often taught as part of a computer science curriculum, and many software engineers hold computer science degrees.

Many software engineers work as employees or contractors. Software engineers work with businesses, government agencies (civilian or military), and non-profit organizations. Some software engineers work for themselves as freelancers. Some organizations have specialists to perform each of the tasks in the software development process. Other organizations require software engineers to do many or all of them. In large projects, people may specialize in only one role. In small projects, people may fill several or all roles at the same time. Specializations include: in industry (analysts, architects, developers, testers, technical support, middleware analysts, managers) and in academia (educators, researchers).

Certification

The Software Engineering Institute offers certification on specific topics like Security, Process improvement and Software architecture. Apple, IBM, Microsoft and other companies also sponsor their own certification examinations. Many IT certification programs are oriented toward specific technologies, and managed by the vendors of these technologies. These certification programs are tailored to the institutions that would employ people who use these technologies.

Broader certification of general software engineering skills is available through various professional societies. As of 2006, the IEEE had certified over 575 software professionals as a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP). In 2008 they added an entry-level certification known as the Certified Software Development Associate (CSDA). In the U.K. the British Computer Society has developed a legally recognized professional certification called Chartered IT Professional (CITP), available to fully qualified Members (MBCS). In Canada the Canadian Information Processing Society has developed a legally recognized professional certification called Information Systems Professional (ISP). The ACM had a professional certification program in the early 1980s, which was discontinued due to lack of interest. The ACM examined the possibility of professional certification of software engineers in the late 1990s, but eventually decided that such certification was inappropriate for the professional industrial practice of software engineering.

Impact of globalization

The initial impact of outsourcing, and the relatively lower cost of international human resources in developing third world countries led to the dot com bubble burst of the 1990s. This had a negative impact on many aspects of the software engineering profession. For example, some students in the developed world avoid education related to software engineering because of the fear of offshore outsourcing (importing software products or services from other countries) and of being displaced by foreign visa workers. Although statistics do not currently show a threat to software engineering itself; a related career, computer programming does appear to have been affected. Nevertheless, the ability to smartly leverage offshore and near-shore resources in an efficient fashion has improved the overall operational capability of many organizations. When Europeans are leaving work, Asians are just arriving to work. When Asians are leaving work, Europeans are arriving to work. This provides a continuous ability to have human oversight on business-critical processes 24 hours per day, without paying overtime compensation or disrupting key human resource sleep patterns.

Education

A knowledge of programming is a pre-requisite to becoming a software engineer. In 2004 the IEEE Computer Society produced the SWEBOK, which has been published as ISO/IEC Technical Report 19759:2004, describing the body of knowledge that they believe should be mastered by a graduate software engineer with four years of experience. Many software engineers enter the profession by obtaining a university degree or training at a vocational school. One standard international curriculum for undergraduate software engineering degrees was defined by the CCSE, and updated in 2004. A number of universities have Software Engineering degree programs; as of 2010, there were 244 Campus programs, 70 Online programs, 230 Masters-level programs, 41 Doctorate-level programs, and 69 Certificate-level programs in the United States.

In addition to university education, many companies sponsor internships for students wishing to pursue careers in information technology. These internships can introduce the student to interesting real-world tasks that typical software engineers encounter every day. Similar experience can be gained through military service in software engineering.

Sub-disciplines

Software engineering can be divided into ten subdisciplines. They are:

Software requirements: The elicitation, analysis, specification, and validation of requirements for software.

Software design: The design of software is usually done with Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools and use standards for the format, such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Software development: The construction of software through the use of programming languages.

Software testing

Software maintenance: Software systems often have problems and need enhancements for a long time after they are first completed. This subfield deals with those problems.

Software configuration management: Since software systems are very complex, their configuration (such as versioning and source control) have to be managed in a standardized and structured method.

Software engineering management: The management of software systems borrows heavily from project management, but there are nuances encountered in software not seen in other management disciplines.

Software development process: The process of building software is hotly debated among practitioners; some of the better-known processes are the Waterfall Model, the Spiral Model, Iterative and Incremental Development, and Agile Development.

Software engineering tools, see Computer Aided Software Engineering

Software quality

Related disciplines

Software engineering is related to the disciplines of computer science, management science, and systems engineering.

Computer science

Software engineering is considered an area of computer science by some academics. Many of the foundations of software engineering come from computer science.

Project management

The building of a software system is usually considered a project and the management of it borrows many principles from the field of Project management.

Systems engineering

Systems engineers have been dealing with the complexity of large systems for many decades and their knowledge is applied to many software engineering problems.

(source:wikipedia)