Software Engineering is Not Enough

J. Whittaker is an associate professor of computer science at the Florida Institute of Technology ([email protected]), S. Atkin is a staff software engineer with the IBM Corporation, Austin, Texas ([email protected]). Abstract—Much of the software engineering literature begins with an admonition that what practitioners are doing isn’t enough—that the state-of-the-practice is creating bad software. This paper does not dispute this fact. However, we believe that what the software engineering literature offers as solutions is 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 actually 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. This paper argues this point and then describes a basic set of technology that real software developers apply before, during and after designing real software, often against unrealistic schedule and budgetary constraints.