Software Engineering

Since the terms software and software engineering (SE) began to be used, they have undergone significant changes. While the meaning of the former has evolved from a specific program to a complex product, the latter has become a professional discipline affecting almost every industry. Spectacular improvements in hardware, memory, and storage capacity, along with the new computing architectures, have paved the way for sophisticated computing systems over the past five decades. Today’s world cannot be run without software, and our global society could not function without professional software systems. Software is embedded inside everything from simple consumer electronics to medical systems to command and control systems. Therefore, it provides a gateway to worldwide information networks; infrastructures, transportation, industry, and financial systems are all controlled by computer-based systems. SE has become critically important, and therefore, software engineers have responsibilities both to the engineering profession and society.

SE is an applied discipline encompassing processes, methods, tools, and principles in order to build reliable, maintainable, and large-scale software systems with high productivity and quality. The inherent constraints in SE stem from its intangibility, complexity, and human dependency, and thus, the main problem in SE is generally viewed as that of making the connection between the abstract world and the physical world. To that aim, software engineers are concerned not only with technical issues but also the conceptual and theoretical background of SE as a discipline. Theory provides a conceptual framework for organizing facts and knowledge, it helps understanding the underlying mechanisms of software systems, and finally, it facilitates communication of ideas in [Page 841]SE community as well as in SE research area. From an evolutionary point of view, SE can be regarded as a young discipline; however, it has transdisciplinary and theoretical foundations that incorporate multifaceted principles in other disciplines while allowing the development and use of SE-specific theories. After defining SE and noting its key concepts of SE, the entry goes on to describe the nature of software, SE as a discipline, its theoretical and transdisciplinary foundations, and the development and use of theory in the research and the software industry.