What is Software Engineering?

Essay by gertUniversity, Master'sA-, April 2006

download word file, 4 pages 4.0

Software engineering applies both computer science and engineering philosophy, principles, and practices to the design and development of software systems. Software Engineering covers not only the technical aspects of building software systems, but also management issues. Many other engineering disciplines have specific definition but there are some concerns in software engineering about its concrete knowledge. Two different approaches appear in terms of the formal education of software engineering. According to Steve Mc Concell (1999, 114) one of the definitions comes from David Parnas at McMaster University, that is; professional software engineers should have very similar educational foundation like other engineers. Second definition comes from a program at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). This program indicates that software engineering is evolved using engineering approaches to develop computer software. This sort of software engineers will be obtained lectures. Those lectures should be based on computer science and management fields rather than common engineering area.

Using engineering approaches to create and develop computer software appears to be more suitable. This can give more opportunity to software engineers for being more specific. At the same time this prevents to being more difficult and more boring.

Stotts (2002) pointed out that engineering is evolved making things on time, within budget, in right quality and performance and cost-effective for the project. Software engineering seems to cover this definition. Because of that software engineering is one of the engineering disciplines. At first glance Software engineering most likely builds on fundamentals of Computer Science but it relates other engineering disciplines as well. Scotts (2002) also states that software engineering has a similar relationship with computer science like between chemical engineering and chemistry. This indicated that software engineering might focus on computer science more than traditional engineering. On the one hand, being responsible for creating and developing new...