Software engineering

Software engineering is an engineering-based approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the engineering design process to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term programmer is sometimes used as a synonym, but may emphasize software implementation over design and can also lack connotations of engineering education or skills. Engineering techniques are used to inform the software development process, which involves the definition, implementation, assessment, measurement, management, change, and improvement of the software life cycle process itself. It heavily uses software configuration management, which is about systematically controlling changes to the configuration, and maintaining the integrity and traceability of the configuration and code throughout the system life cycle. Modern processes use software versioning. History of software engineering Beginning in the 1960s, software engineering was seen as its own type of engineering. Additionally, the development of software engineering was seen as a struggle. It was difficult to keep up with the hardware which caused many problems for software engineers. Problems included software that was over budget, exceeded deadlines, required extensive debugging and maintenance, and unsuccessfully met the needs of consumers or was never even completed. In 1968 NATO held the first Software Engineering conference where issues related to software were addressed: guidelines and best practices for the development of software were established. The origins of the term software engineering have been attributed to various sources. The term 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.