Software engineering

The development of the software engineering discipline arose out of the software crisis of the 1960s and 1970s, when many large software projects went over budget and deadlines in an unexpected manner. TBD: Examples needed.

It was believed that this crisis was due to the lack of discipline of programmers, and it was believed that if more formal engineering methodologies could be applied to software development, the production of software would become as predictable an industry as other branches of engineering.

Libraries are full of books that have been written on the subject. Some of the best have been published by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Methods have improved through the 1980s and 1990s, but the complexity in requirements have increased fast enough to consume any improvement. One problem is that many customers are first time customers without previous experience from writing requirements for a software project. If the programmers are good, the system will work, and the customer will not fully appreciate how complex the task was. There is also a constant eagerness to develop new tools and try the newest tools in each new project.

TBD: maybe a list of methodologies here, for example:

See also SWEBOK, computer science. Exactly where is the border between science, technology, and engineering here?

/Talk