Practitioners do good work

• Authors: L. B. S. Raccoon
• Venue: ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes
• Year: 2002

I believe that software engineers have done, are doing, and will continue to do good work. Practitioners contribute to the well-being of society and add value to the economy. Working applications enable hundreds of millions of users around the world to productively do things that would otherwise be impossible.I do not claim that software engineers are perfect. Bugs seem to lurk in almost all programs. Reliable schedules and budgets remain elusive. And, software has created whole new slates of problems, like hacking and viruses. For now, I rely on Peter Neumann and his Risks columns to document these concerns. I consider this paper a companion to counterpoint Neumann's columns.My primary purpose is to claim that software engineers are successful, in spite of their shortcomings. In the first section, I argue that practitioners create enormous social and economic value. In the second section, I discuss the ongoing improvement that software engineers make in their practice. In the third section, I propose documenting the greatest twenty achievements of software engineering to show the success of practitioners. And in the fourth section, I argue that practitioners earn their keep.My secondary propose is to respond to and elaborate on comments made at the Why Don't We Get More (Self?) Respect panel at ICSE 2000 and the Impact Project Panel at ICSE 2001. I discuss how software engineers contribute to projects like the world wide web, and I echo Larry Bernstein's comments that software engineers deliver value.