Debates within software engineering

The term engineering within the word software engineering causes a lot of confusion.

With about 612,000 software engineers in the U.S., and many more around the world, there should be room for many different opinions and approaches. A consensus has yet to emerge.

Table of contents

1 Right to use the word engineering 2 Substance versus metaphor 3 Relation to other terms 4 Fighting over priorities

Right to use the word engineering

The wrangling over the status of software engineering (between traditional engineers and computer scientists) can be interpreted as a fight over control of the word engineering. Traditional engineers question whether software engineers can legally use the term.

Traditional engineers (especially civil engineers and the NSPE) claim that they have special rights over the term engineering, and for anyone else to use it requires their approval. In the mid-1990s, the NSPE sued to prevent anyone from using the job title software engineering. The NSPE won their lawsuit in 48 states.

However, SE practitioners, educators, and researchers ignored the lawsuits and called themselves software engineers anyway. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the term software engineer, too. The term engineering is much older than any regulatory body, so many believe that traditional engineers have few rights to control the term.

The fields of data engineering, knowledge engineering, user interface engineering, and so on have similar concerns about the term engineering. Even smaller or newer fields of biological engineering, safety engineering, and corrosion engineering have these concerns.

Substance versus metaphor

Some believe that the name SE means that practitioners must also be traditional engineers. Others believe that engineering is only a metaphor that SEs should apply appropriately.

Substance: Those who define software engineering as a branch of traditional engineering often believe that SEs apply concepts from traditional engineering to software development. This means that software engineering student should study physics, chemistry, and calculus; practitioners should earn professional licenses; and so on. They believe engineering provides a structured, logical approach, and therefore, a stable final product.

Many traditional engineering disciplines are based on logic and the mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, algebra, linear algebra and differential calculus, as well as the first principles of science such as Newton's laws, the laws of thermodynamics, Maxwell's equations, etc. Most of the engineering rules-of-thumb that make up traditional engineering derive from the first principles of their respective physical and mathematical foundations. Software engineering has no such first principles that all practioners agree to, and this makes it harder to justify it as an engineering discipline as opposed to a trade or a craft.

Metaphor: Others are inspired by traditional engineering, but believe that software needs its own solutions. They believe that many traditional engineering concepts cannot apply, because software is fundamentally different than bridges and roads. For example, traditional engineers do not use compilers or linkers to build roads. They believe that students should study computer science and other useful topics, and that practictioners do not necessarily need licenses.

Relation to other terms

Prior to the mid-1990s, most software practitioners called themselves programmers or developers, regardless of their actual jobs. Many people prefer to call themselves software developer and programmer, because we widely agree what these terms mean, while software engineer is still being debated.

The term programmer has often been used as a pejorative term to refer to those who lacked the tools, skills, education, or ethics to write quality software. In response, many practitioners called themselves software engineers to escape the stigma attached to the word programmer. In many companies, the titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer, for many categories of programmers.

These terms cause confusion, because some denied any differences (arguing that everyone does essentially the same thing with software) while others use the terms to create a difference (because the terms mean completely different jobs).

Fighting over priorities

Everyone agrees that we want better software, but we disagree on priorities, approaches, and on what an individual should do in a specific circumstance. Everyone seems to advocate a different combination of the following issues. Proponents and methodologists advocate conflicting solutions and often heatedly debate their merits. All subfields mix the following priorities to varying degrees.

Management: Some advocate that software engineering is primarily about the management practices necessary to make reliable budgets and schedules. People at the Software Engineering Institute took this approach and created the CMM.

Formal methods: Some advocate applying rigorous mathematical analysis to computer programming, especially proofs of correctness. They believe that traditional engineering is carried out with mathematical rigor, while programming is an iterative, trial-and-error process. These advocates strive to make programming more rigorous.

Process: Some advocate that software engineers must follow step-by-step processes, much like assembly line workers. This inspired CMM, ISO 9000, RUP, SPICE, and other methods and processes.

Tools: Some advocate that software engineering means tools, especially CASE tools (like Unix tools and IDEss) that emphasize high-level architecture issues. Today's CASE tools emphasize UML.

Ethics: Some advocate that software engineering is mostly about codes of ethics and social responsibility. They sometimes argue that bugs are due to lapses of ethics.

Licenses: Some advocate defining software engineering in terms of professional licenses, like some traditional engineers have. The biggest advocates of this position are from Texas and Canada, where the state governments sponsor licenses for SEs.

Degrees: Some advocate defining SE by college degrees. Most professions have college degrees tailored to the needs of practitioners. Many graduate software engineering degrees are available and undergraduate degrees are becoming available. (Move to SE education?)

Cost and Time versus Quality: Subfields like consumer applications are sensitive to time and cost. Subfields like military and medical applications are sensitive to quality.