Engineering Software & Software Engineering

Abstract

Software has become an indispensable part of most products and services. As a result the need to “engineer software” professionally with high quality at low cost has become important to all branches of industry. The supporting scientific discipline called “software engineering”, on the other hand, has matured very slowly, and has only just now arrived at the verge of making a real contribution to truly professionalizing the “engineering of software”. This presentation reviews the historic evolution of both the profession of “engineering software” as well as the scientific discipline of “software engineering”, points out their symbiotic relationship, and closes with an outlook into a visionary future full of challenges for practitioners, researchers and teachers.

Today, most products and services of our daily lives depend highly on complex software. That means that product or service quality is impossible without software quality. This situation has led to increasing pressure on the profession of “engineering software” to transform quickly from a toy discipline (i.e., one hacked software for one’s own use) to a development discipline (i.e., one makes money by selling highdemand software without being held responsible for low quality), all the way to an engineering discipline (i.e., quality of software is treated like quality of any regular engineering product).

In consequence this means that a sound scientific basis is needed for describing software products (i.e., software programming languages), for developing software (i.e., software development methods), for coordinating and managing software development (i.e., software development processes), and for assuring the desired qualities of software and improving over time (i.e., quality assurance and management approaches).