The Push to Make Software Engineering Respectable

S oftware engineering (SE) is maturing as a discipline and profession, but three decades after the first NATO Conference on Software Engineering, it is still not regarded as a legitimate , respectable engineering profession. In 1995, Gary Ford and Norman Gibbs of the Software Engineering Institute evaluated what it means for a profession to be mature and how SE was doing. 1 Their extensive and fascinating study found that, relative to other fields and engineering branches, most elements that make SE a profession were quite immature. Five years later, SE has countless practitioners (a.k.a. software developers), thousands of articles, dozens of conferences and workshops, and a respectable number of education and training programs. The computer science (CS) and SE communities (educators, researchers, practitioners, and professional societies) are further along in defining a body of knowledge, code of ethics, accreditation guidelines, and licensing programs. But despite all this progress, SE, while recognizable, is still immature—as evidenced by the significant gap between vision, education, and standard practice. The reasons are legion, but they boil down to one simple fact: The field is still young. There just hasn't been enough time to gain widespread community consensus on issues, to stabilize a core body of knowledge, and to develop a large enough pool (several generations) of experienced practitioners and educators. The rapid changes in this field make the road to maturity even rougher. Although we believe time will eventually mature SE, a calculated push can accelerate the maturation process. By " push, " we mean defining, accrediting, and evaluating new curricula that stress CS and SE fundamentals and practice, focus on lifelong learning and team experience , and increase the role of the professional societies in accreditation, certification, and licensing efforts. Although the push will not overcome all issues, it will go far in addressing the most knotty ones. Establishing SE programs is fraught with economic, political, and pedagogic challenges—notably how to divorce SE (or if it should be divorced) from existing CS and computer engineering (CE) curricula. Any solutions will have to come from deeper, more extensive industrial-academic-professional society partnerships. This is key. We have spent some time considering the reasons for SE's immaturity. All of us are heavily involved in both industry and academia and have been active in professional societies that aim to promote SE as a profession. Promotion efforts are by no means limited to the US, but because our …