Software Engineering is Not Enough

  • Authors:

  • James A. Whittaker;Steven Atkin

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Much software engineering literature begins with the admonition that practitioners aren't doing enough-that the state of the practice is creating bad software. The authors do not dispute this fact. However, they believe that what software engineering literature offers as solutions are also not enough. Books on the subject favor the "light" side of the discipline: project management, software process improvement, schedule and cost estimation, and so forth. The real technology necessary to build software is often described abstractly, given as obvious, or ignored altogether. But software development is a fundamentally technical problem for which management solutions can only be partially effective. So, the authors describe a basic set of technologies that real software developers apply before, during, and after designing real software, often against unrealistic schedule and budgetary constraints.