Software engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.[1] It encompasses techniques and procedures, often regulated by a software development process, with the purpose of improving the reliability and maintainability of software systems.[2] The effort is necessitated by the potential complexity of those systems, which may contain millions of lines of code.[3]
The term software engineering was coined by Brian Randell and popularized by F.L. Bauer during the NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968.[4] The discipline of software engineering includes knowledge, tools, and methods for software requirements, software desig, software construction, software testing, and software maintenance tasks.[5] Software engineering is related to the disciplines of computer science, computer engineering, management, mathematics, project management, quality management, software ergonomics, and systems engineering.[6]
In 2004, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 760,840 software engineers holding jobs in the U.S.; in the same time period there were some 1.4 million practitioners employed in the U.S. in all other engineering disciplines combined.[7] Due to its relative newness as a field of study, formal education in software engineering is often taught as part of a computer science curriculum, and as a result most software engineers hold computer science degrees.[8]The term software engineer is used very liberally in the corporate world. Very few of the practicing software engineers actually hold Engineering degrees from accredited universities. In fact, according to the Association for Computing Machinery, "most people who now function in the U.S. as serious software engineers have degrees in computer science, not in software engineering".