Abstract
The field of software engineering has been evolving since its inception in 1968. Arguments as to the exact nature of the field, whether it should be conceived as a real engineering profession, the role of formal methods, whether it is as much an art as a science, etc., continue to divide both practitioners and academics. My purpose here is not to debate these particular topics, but rather to approach the field from the outside, coming as I do from a long period of involvement in the human and social side of the computing discipline, namely, from the fields of Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Participative Design, Interaction Design, and Social Informatics, more generally. I wish to examine how this “human-centred” perspective might shed a new light on some issues within the SE field, perhaps opening up topics for further discussion and examination.
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Bannon, L.J. (2010). Approaches to Software Engineering: A Human-Centred Perspective. In: Bernhaupt, R., Forbrig, P., Gulliksen, J., Lárusdóttir, M. (eds) Human-Centred Software Engineering. HCSE 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6409. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16488-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16488-0_1
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