The Future of Software Engineering

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Through its first 40 years, the field of “Software Engineering” produced little that was useful to the software practitioner. That has led to a very peculiar situation: we have a field where the set of practices referred to as “engineering” simply doesn’t work well, and are deliberately avoided by the vast majority of skilled practitioners in the field. (The situation is odd because, in other fields, the term “engineering” is reserved for practices that lead to success.) As a result, the idea is spreading that perhaps software development is simply incompatible with engineering; that software developers are not, and never will be, real engineers.

I believe that any field that mass-produces useful artifacts for people must take its practices seriously, and must approach them with an engineer’s sense of responsibility. It’s time to take a fresh look at what that really should mean for our field. With an extra 45 years of experience about the task of programming, and a broad survey of the varied different engineering disciplines, can we envision a future for a field of “software engineering” that is worthy of the name?

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