Chapter IV Software Engineering – Processes and Tools

Software engineering traditionally plays an important role among the different research directions located in the Software Park Hagenberg, as it provides the fundamental concepts, methods and tools for producing reliable and high quality software. Software engineering as a quite young profession and engineering discipline is not limited to focus on how to create simple software programms, but in fact introduces a complex and most of the time quite costly lifecycle of software and derived products. Some efforts have been made to define software engineering as a profession and to outline the boundaries of this emerging field of research [PP04, Som04]. Several different definitions of the term software engineering appeared since its first mentioning on a NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968. A good example of an early definition of the term software engineering which is often cited in the literature is the following: