The profession of IT Is software engineering engineering? | Peter J. Denning & Richard ... - 0 views
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David Ing on 28 Jun 09daviding says: If software engineering is engineering, then we should also think about service engineering as engineering. This article also helps to draw some lines between engineering as applied science, and more theoretical forms of science, both in the domain of services systems and human systems.
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David Ing on 28 Jun 09Gerald Weinberg once wrote, "If software engineering truly is engineering, then it ought to be able to learn from the evolution of other engineering disciplines." Robert Glass and his colleagues provocatively evaluated how often software engineering literature does this.4 They concluded that the literature relies heavily on software anecdotes and draws very lightly from other engineering fields. Walter Tichy found that fewer than 50% of the published software engineering papers tested their hypotheses, compared to 90% in most other fields. So software engineering may suffer from our habit of paying too little attention to how other engineers do engineering. In a recent extensive study of practices engineers expect explicitly or tacitly, Riehle found six we do not do well. Predictable outcomes (principle of least surprise). [....] Design metrics, including design to tolerances. [....] Failure tolerance. [....] Separation of design from implementation. [....] Reconciliation of conflicting forces and constraints. [....] Adapting to changing environments. [....]