What makes software development engineering

mikewarot

> In fact, in some Canadian provinces, titles in computing such as “software engineer,” “computer engineer,” and others containing “engineer” are (in principle) reserved for people licensed as engineers by the provincial engineering regulator. A most rational stance. One we should enforce here in the US. Edit: Yes, I'm arguing that Software Engineer should be a licensed profession, but programmer shouldn't, and would be a fine substitution in the cases where you didn't need rigor. -- If I were an engineer, there's no way I would trust any interface to a control system for a water purification plant that connected to the internet and allowed for ingress of control. Just as an example. The OPM hack of 2015[1] is the worst case, in terms of national security, that clearly proves no Engineers were involved in the design of their computer system. Ingress of control should be absolutely prohibited, and it wasn't. I don't know why that database was ever put into a computer, instead of filing cabinets in a vault, nor why it was ever connected to any other system, and not completely air-gapped in said vault, with manual controlled exfiltration of data upon request. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...

glenjamin

Hillel Wayne did a series of interviews with people who are considered "proper" engineers, which you can read here: https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/ the tl;dr is that for the most part, modern software development is very similar to engineering

RunSet

I notice that software-related professions tend be named after traditionally male-dominated fields, such as "software engineer" or "software architect" or even the "rock star programmer". Which is strange since the original "computers" were predominately women[0] and I find writing software has much in common with activities that were historically at least coed, such as creating recipes or sewing patterns. Yet we never hear of "software chefs" or "software tailors". Given how little many titular heads of software companies understand their product, "software nanny" would also be applicable. [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/history-human-...

randysalami

I think only some software work is engineering and if I call myself a software engineer (in regard to my employment), it’s because it’s actually “a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software”. And not just paying lip service. Otherwise, I’m something else with or even without the word software in the title (even if I work with software). Outside of work, I inherently consider myself a software engine but if work requires it, I have no problems treating it as less.

tfrancisl

Using the engineering design process makes it engineering.

testing22321

My degree is Software Engineering, and is fully accredited by the Australian Institute of Engineers. It was two years longer than computer science, and all of those extra courses were with the “mainstream” Engineers.

dboreham

Ugh. It's called engineering because in the beginning each university built or bought one computer. That machine was either owned by the mathematics department or the electrical engineering department (for hopefully obvious reasons). Fast forward a few decades and we have the twin disciplines of Computer Science and Software Engineering.

reaperducer

What makes software development engineering Wishful thinking and brand inflation. Same thing that makes machine learning artificial intelligence.

kerblang

Author begins by describing the complexity crisis that folks tried to address at 1968 NATO SEC but then talks about engineering as a problem-solving effort involving calculations and caches. Is it a surprise the complexity crisis continues? Dependencies rage out of control in modern systems, creating all sorts of havoc, including security issues. The academy seems to have little interest in this.

TomOwens

For the past couple of months, I've been doing a deep dive into engineering and engineering philosophy, and I have some thoughts about this article. The biggest thing I noticed was that, even though there was an acknowledgment of the lack of a singular definition of engineering, the definition used throughout was tied to a linear model of innovation. I've been able to trace this thinking to the 1920s, with a growth in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s. A prime example is Vannevar Bush's Science: The Endless Frontier. Although the report had some good outcomes, like leading to the establishment of the National Science Foundation, Bush's own autobiography acknowledged that this model was a disservice to engineers and engineering, as it led to many engineering accomplishments being touted as scientific achievements and scientists getting credit for the work of engineers in popular literature and the press. There aren't too many other views of engineering out there. A handful of contemporary authors keep coming up: Florman, Vincenti, Ferguson, Koen, and Petroski. Most other things I've read tend to cite one or more of these authors and continue to build upon their foundations. Picking up any one of the other perspectives on engineering would let you make another connection to the 1968 NATO conference. There were really three camps that offered definitions about what software engineering should be. People like Dijkstra, Hoare, Naur, and Wirth focused on applying mathematics and computer science and on theory building. McIlroy, Bauer, and Bemer looked at how software development could learn from industrial engineering and mass production. David and Ross emphasized practical problem solving. By the 1969 conference, the practical problem-solving piece had dropped out of focus, even though this is very closely related to how other engineering philosophers looked at engineering. Another aspect from some of the engineering philosophers is the craft roots of engineering. This also tends to disprove the linear model of innovation. Engineering existed well before modern science, and there are several cases of engineering development without a robust scientific understanding of the principles that enable it. Modern science became a tool in the toolbox of modern engineers, but it's not a precursor to engineering. The craft roots have been there all along and were part of engineering education up into the early 1900s. This can tie back into Agile Software Development and the software craftsmanship movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. The paragraph about application programming being removed from the debates in the 1960s misses a key point. In the 1960s, "software" was shorthand for "systems software", or the stuff provided by computer manufacturers to allow people to make their computers do stuff. Application programs were not really considered software until at least the 1970s. It's a bit nuanced, but there's a reason for excluding this group of people: it was seen as a different thing entirely. Finally, no mention of Margaret Hamilton. Failing to even mention Hamilton and her use of software engineering as an aspiration to elevate programmers to the same status as the other engineering disciplines on the Apollo program misses a huge moment in the development of the idea of software engineering.

bluetomcat

"Software engineering" is the corporate aspect concerned with the "right" way to do stuff, often picking inadequate analogies from physical manufacturing and traditional engineering. It builds the ungainly, monolith dinosaurs and the technical debt. It is OOP, enterprise Java with the abstract factories, MFC, "agile methodologies" and "agentic workflows". It creates the dogma and the ideologies. "Programming" is the creative tinkering aspect where you start from scratch and approach a problem from a new light. This is how Unix was born. It is the 1000-line program that is composable, fun to read and write and will last a long time.

woah

If you can't select the proper saplings and branches with the right elasticity to build a powerful ballista in any region in Europe, or plan and direct a mine under a fortress wall, you can't call yourself an Engineer. PERIOD

cadamsdotcom

Wrangling agentic code is more like an industrial process than craftspersonship. You need to treat the code that arrived in response to your prompt as a raw material: just like some truckload of unrefined and unmolded "stuff", it just arrived at your factory door, and it is still in need of banging into shape. Your job is to build and operate the machinery (which is also software) that turns raw slop into worthy output. Determine the tolerances (eg. quality tolerance: how bug-free must this be to ship?) and then work out how you'll scale up and remove yourself from as much of the attainment of those tolerances as possible, given constraints. Consider by way of analogy an industrial food factory that mass produces, say, pickled fish. The fish are caught and brought to the factory - that's your agent's first-draft output. Next the fish are put by hand on a belt to be dipped, fired, cured, etc. - that mix of by-hand steps and automated steps is where you'd be crafting the custom linting steps, making the code compiled and having the agent write tests that prove quality, playing with the work (testing the feature, bugfix etc. by hand) and bringing it further from slop to the level of quality that's needed. The amount of this you do is determined by constraints - cost, time, etc. Now that you're sizing your efforts against constraints and using tolerances as a tool, you're making the transition in your role, from craftsperson to engineer. It's sort of like a factory. But it's never going to be a lights-out factory. You should design, supervise and improve the process in line with constraints and tolerances provided by stakeholders. And leave perfectionism at the door. You can chase your own definition of perfection in your hobby time, or if you want to get paid for perfection, start your own business where you call the shots.