Engineering Design for Software: on Defining the Software Engineering Profession

1 J. L. Díaz-Herrera, Southern Polytechnic State University, School of Computing and Software Engineering, Marietta, GA 30060. [email protected] Abstract  Since the mid-1980s, software engineering has been accepted as a formal field of study in academia. Software engineering education is maturing from specialized courses in computer science, to numerous Master's programs, and more recently to the advent of undergraduate as well as PhD programs. What is new today is the widespread impetus from many fronts to consider software development as engineering profession. The notion of whether software development is engineering can be answered in a number of ways. In this paper we look at generally accepted definitions of engineering and show their correspondence or applicability to software development. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis how prominent features that cut across all engineering disciplines are found in software engineering as well. We conclude with a discussion of the educational implications..