Software engineering

Software engineering

Software engineering is the systematic application of engineering approaches to the development of software. Software engineering is a computing discipline.

When the first 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 division between "hardware" and "software" began with abstraction being used to deal with the complexity of computing.

Programming languages started to appear in the early 1950s and this was also another major step in abstraction. Major languages such as Fortran, ALGOL, PL/I, and COBOL were released in the late 1950 and 1960s to deal with scientific, algorithmic, and business problems respectively. 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.

The origins of the term "software engineering" have been attributed to various sources. The term "software engineering" appeared in a list of services offered by companies in the June 1965 issue of COMPUTERS and AUTOMATION and was used more formally in the August 1966 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 9, number 8) “letter to the ACM membership” by the ACM President Anthony A. Oettinger, it is also associated with the title of a NATO conference in 1968 by Professor Friedrich L. Bauer, the first conference on software engineering. Independently, Margaret Hamilton named the discipline "software engineering" during the Apollo missions to give what they were doing legitimacy.^[11] At the time there was perceived to be a "software crisis". The 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018) celebrates 50 years of "Software Engineering" with the Plenary Sessions' keynotes of Frederick Brooks and Margaret Hamilton.

In 1984, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) was established as a federally funded research and development center headquartered on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Watts Humphrey founded the SEI Software Process Program, aimed at understanding and managing the software engineering process. The Process Maturity Levels introduced would become the Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI-DEV), which has defined how the US Government evaluates the abilities of a software development team.

Modern, generally accepted best-practices for software engineering have been collected by the ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 7 subcommittee and published as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK).

Software engineering is defined as a process of analyzing user requirements and then designing, building, and testing software application which will satisfy those requirements.

Let's look at the various definitions of software engineering:

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  IEEE, in its standard 610.12-1990, defines software engineering as the application of a systematic, disciplined, which is a computable approach for the development, operation, and maintenance of software.
  
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  Fritz Bauer defined it as 'the establishment and used standard engineering principles. It helps you to obtain, economically, software which is reliable and works efficiently on the real machines'.
  
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  Boehm defines software engineering, which involves, 'the practical application of scientific knowledge to the creative design and building of computer programs. It also includes associated documentation needed for developing, operating, and maintaining them.'