Engineering a Profession

Engineering a Profession

1. Need for Engineering

   • Engineers tend to design things rather than provide services to individuals
   • Their responsibility is more often to society than to specific people

2. Engineering and Art

   • The level of engineering prowess determines how large a software system can be built successfully
     • how easy it will be to use
     • how fast it will operate
     • how many errors it will contain
     • how well it will cooperate with other systems

3. Maturation of Engineering Disciplines

   • Some of the problems encountered by commercial production can’t be solved via trial and error, and, if the economic stakes are high enough, a corresponding science will develop.
   • The practitioners working in the field at that point must be well-educated in both the theory and practice of their profession.

4. A Science for Software Development

   • The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
   • Reusable software project artifacts are a set of solved problems—
   • Many software project artifacts are potentially reusable, and many of them promise more potential to improve quality and productivity than the most commonly reused artifact,

5. The Call of Engineering

   • any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
   • Whether the goal is safety, aesthetics, or economics, treating software as an engineering discipline is an effective way to raise software development to the level of a true profession.