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I would,like,to know whether software engineering involve studing about science or learning some science subjects like biology ,physics,mathematics or chemistry — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nsereko Hamza ( talk • contribs) 10:55, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
The overview table at the right says the following: Software Development core activities: (Software) Requirements, (Software) Design, (Software) Testing, (Software) Maintenance .... However, the body of the article says: Fields (of Software Engineering): ... Software Requirements, Software Design, Software Testing, Software Maintenance. Each practice should belong to either Software Development or Software Engineering, but not both at the same time.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.0.117.22 ( talk • contribs) 03:05, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
Software engineer#Education and Software engineer#Profession entirely overlap the sections of this article with the same names. The remaining section of Software engineer#Use of the title "Engineer" entirely overlaps with Software engineering professionalism and should be merged there. If we want to keep the engineering field and the profession separate, then I'd merge into Programmer due to use of that term as a synonym and substantial overlap when it's used with a different meaning; see Programmer#Terminology. -- Beland ( talk) 02:19, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
@ Beland: Just read through the software development article and had a glance at this software engineering article. I'm considering the possibility of merging these two articles together. There seems to be a decent amount of overlap between them, and from my understanding, the names "software developer" and "software engineering" are used interchangeably in terms of job titles. The name of the merged article should probably remain "software development" since that seems to be the more widely used title out of the two (I may be wrong though). Thoughts? Aitch & Aitch Aitch ( talk) 20:43, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
@ Beland and Aitch & Aitch Aitch: have not run into another discussion here where I have been at loss for words, but this one has done it. I admit to a few days of being completely speechless. Now I will try to explain without this turning into an academic lecture on the topic. You are proposing blanking the article on the area of software research in which I earned my masters degree in computer science and turning it into a few paragraphs in the software development article.
Software engineering is not another word for software development. It is one particular approach to software development, with an emphasis on quality. This was driven initially by government and military concerns in the US and Europe about the poor state of the products they were being delivered from large-scale, expensive projects. The Department of Defense has funded much of the research in this area and even had a computer language created. Most software development is not done in this way. Technical companies started calling their developers software engineers and more recently people have been referring to software development in some areas as software engineering. But the article is about the topic of software engineering whose history is given at History of software engineering.
The confusion between software engineering and software development is also understandable because the article contains so little information about the field of software engineering. The article is one of the oldest in Wikipedia. It predates the current database so we don't have the oldest edits. The earliest one we have is 14 November 2001 (and it removes most of the article with the comment "minor copyediting"). There have been 5194 edits since. Sometimes the article has had content about the actual topic of software engineering, as it did early on; sometimes it was mostly about other things. Most SE related stuff is no longer in it or was never in it. Early edits happened before sources were required for material which was available in textbook. Much of the editing seems to have been from students adding textbook-type material rather than from scholarly or technical sources.
Universities encourage a careful approach to writing software by trying to influence students. There are two paths to becoming a computer programmer at a level above just writing code. (You can get 2-year degrees in software development at community colleges.) If you want to work for technical companies you take courses in computer science. The course that introduces the full range of software development is called Software Engineering and is taught using one of the textbooks titled Software Engineering. If you are interested in business computing you take courses in information technology. In IT the course that introduces the full range of software development is called Systems Analysis and Design and is taught from one of the textbooks with the same name. Systems Analysis and Design is business computing's approach to development that emphasizes quality. (Wikipedia doesn't have an article on this and it should. It's history and development is also very interesting.) See the tables of contents and introductions at
Note that the descriptions of software development are different in the two books.
What really matters is not what students learn but how the companies they will work for approach software development. One of the developments in software engineering was a mechanism for customers to be assured that the software they contract for will be developed using the these methods. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, funded by the Department of Defense, developed Capability Maturity Models which assessed a company's software development process. Government contracts required meeting a certain level, and other companies required that their suppliers meet certain levels. Whether that was at all successful is unclear, and the SEI no longer does the assessments.
Software Engineering is a large enough topic with a 50 year history and can't be summed up concisely in the article on software development. That article is already written in summary style with sections having main articles of their own anyway. A major topic in computing meets Wikipedia's requirements for having an article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by StarryGrandma ( talk • contribs) 21:54, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
The lead section explains that software engineering is "an engineering approach on a software development of systematics application." What is this supposed to mean? Jarble ( talk) 00:31, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
I went looking for citations for the Texas licensing requirements. The best I can find is the law itself ( [1]). Sure enough, the term "engineer" is regulated here, in Sec. 1001.301.(b) of the Texas Occupations Code:
Except as provided by Subsection (f), a person may not, unless the person holds a license issued under this chapter, directly or indirectly use or cause to be used as a professional, business, or commercial identification, title, name, representation, claim, asset, or means of advantage or benefit any of, or a variation or abbreviation of, the following terms...(1) engineer
That "except as provided by subsection f" is doing a lot here. Subsection f states, paraphrased, that using "engineer" is allowed by individuals exempt from the licensing requirements of this chapter under Sections 1001.057 or 1001.058
so long as they're not offering professional engineering services to the public or using the title in a context that misrepresents them as a licensed professional engineer. Section 1001.057 states that requirements are waived for a private corporation or other business entity, or the activities of the full-time employees or other personnel under the direct supervision and control of the business entity, on or in connection with...activities related only to the research, development, design, fabrication, production, assembly, integration, or service of products manufactured by the entity
, and goes on to explicitly state For purposes of this section, "products manufactured by the entity" also includes computer software, firmware, hardware...
.
I am not a lawyer and have no idea if this explicitly allows using the term "software engineer" with no restrictions, however I was unable to find any source (minus a couple stack exchange posts) claiming it's not allowed, and job listings for Software Engineer positions in Texas mostly do not seem to list professional certification in the requirements. I've erred on removing the claim altogether, since it seems that in practice the term is used in Texas by unlicensed software engineers. If someone else has a better read here or a source more clearly summarizing, feel free to re-add. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 21:23, 23 June 2023 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Software engineering article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
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Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
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1,
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3,
4,
5,
6Auto-archiving period: 180 days
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![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 09:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 16 May 2021. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
C.robinrcbc. Peer reviewers:
Monica Pramono.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 09:44, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
I would,like,to know whether software engineering involve studing about science or learning some science subjects like biology ,physics,mathematics or chemistry — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nsereko Hamza ( talk • contribs) 10:55, 8 February 2020 (UTC)
The overview table at the right says the following: Software Development core activities: (Software) Requirements, (Software) Design, (Software) Testing, (Software) Maintenance .... However, the body of the article says: Fields (of Software Engineering): ... Software Requirements, Software Design, Software Testing, Software Maintenance. Each practice should belong to either Software Development or Software Engineering, but not both at the same time.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.0.117.22 ( talk • contribs) 03:05, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
Software engineer#Education and Software engineer#Profession entirely overlap the sections of this article with the same names. The remaining section of Software engineer#Use of the title "Engineer" entirely overlaps with Software engineering professionalism and should be merged there. If we want to keep the engineering field and the profession separate, then I'd merge into Programmer due to use of that term as a synonym and substantial overlap when it's used with a different meaning; see Programmer#Terminology. -- Beland ( talk) 02:19, 31 July 2021 (UTC)
@ Beland: Just read through the software development article and had a glance at this software engineering article. I'm considering the possibility of merging these two articles together. There seems to be a decent amount of overlap between them, and from my understanding, the names "software developer" and "software engineering" are used interchangeably in terms of job titles. The name of the merged article should probably remain "software development" since that seems to be the more widely used title out of the two (I may be wrong though). Thoughts? Aitch & Aitch Aitch ( talk) 20:43, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
@ Beland and Aitch & Aitch Aitch: have not run into another discussion here where I have been at loss for words, but this one has done it. I admit to a few days of being completely speechless. Now I will try to explain without this turning into an academic lecture on the topic. You are proposing blanking the article on the area of software research in which I earned my masters degree in computer science and turning it into a few paragraphs in the software development article.
Software engineering is not another word for software development. It is one particular approach to software development, with an emphasis on quality. This was driven initially by government and military concerns in the US and Europe about the poor state of the products they were being delivered from large-scale, expensive projects. The Department of Defense has funded much of the research in this area and even had a computer language created. Most software development is not done in this way. Technical companies started calling their developers software engineers and more recently people have been referring to software development in some areas as software engineering. But the article is about the topic of software engineering whose history is given at History of software engineering.
The confusion between software engineering and software development is also understandable because the article contains so little information about the field of software engineering. The article is one of the oldest in Wikipedia. It predates the current database so we don't have the oldest edits. The earliest one we have is 14 November 2001 (and it removes most of the article with the comment "minor copyediting"). There have been 5194 edits since. Sometimes the article has had content about the actual topic of software engineering, as it did early on; sometimes it was mostly about other things. Most SE related stuff is no longer in it or was never in it. Early edits happened before sources were required for material which was available in textbook. Much of the editing seems to have been from students adding textbook-type material rather than from scholarly or technical sources.
Universities encourage a careful approach to writing software by trying to influence students. There are two paths to becoming a computer programmer at a level above just writing code. (You can get 2-year degrees in software development at community colleges.) If you want to work for technical companies you take courses in computer science. The course that introduces the full range of software development is called Software Engineering and is taught using one of the textbooks titled Software Engineering. If you are interested in business computing you take courses in information technology. In IT the course that introduces the full range of software development is called Systems Analysis and Design and is taught from one of the textbooks with the same name. Systems Analysis and Design is business computing's approach to development that emphasizes quality. (Wikipedia doesn't have an article on this and it should. It's history and development is also very interesting.) See the tables of contents and introductions at
Note that the descriptions of software development are different in the two books.
What really matters is not what students learn but how the companies they will work for approach software development. One of the developments in software engineering was a mechanism for customers to be assured that the software they contract for will be developed using the these methods. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, funded by the Department of Defense, developed Capability Maturity Models which assessed a company's software development process. Government contracts required meeting a certain level, and other companies required that their suppliers meet certain levels. Whether that was at all successful is unclear, and the SEI no longer does the assessments.
Software Engineering is a large enough topic with a 50 year history and can't be summed up concisely in the article on software development. That article is already written in summary style with sections having main articles of their own anyway. A major topic in computing meets Wikipedia's requirements for having an article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by StarryGrandma ( talk • contribs) 21:54, 3 September 2021 (UTC)
The lead section explains that software engineering is "an engineering approach on a software development of systematics application." What is this supposed to mean? Jarble ( talk) 00:31, 23 April 2022 (UTC)
I went looking for citations for the Texas licensing requirements. The best I can find is the law itself ( [1]). Sure enough, the term "engineer" is regulated here, in Sec. 1001.301.(b) of the Texas Occupations Code:
Except as provided by Subsection (f), a person may not, unless the person holds a license issued under this chapter, directly or indirectly use or cause to be used as a professional, business, or commercial identification, title, name, representation, claim, asset, or means of advantage or benefit any of, or a variation or abbreviation of, the following terms...(1) engineer
That "except as provided by subsection f" is doing a lot here. Subsection f states, paraphrased, that using "engineer" is allowed by individuals exempt from the licensing requirements of this chapter under Sections 1001.057 or 1001.058
so long as they're not offering professional engineering services to the public or using the title in a context that misrepresents them as a licensed professional engineer. Section 1001.057 states that requirements are waived for a private corporation or other business entity, or the activities of the full-time employees or other personnel under the direct supervision and control of the business entity, on or in connection with...activities related only to the research, development, design, fabrication, production, assembly, integration, or service of products manufactured by the entity
, and goes on to explicitly state For purposes of this section, "products manufactured by the entity" also includes computer software, firmware, hardware...
.
I am not a lawyer and have no idea if this explicitly allows using the term "software engineer" with no restrictions, however I was unable to find any source (minus a couple stack exchange posts) claiming it's not allowed, and job listings for Software Engineer positions in Texas mostly do not seem to list professional certification in the requirements. I've erred on removing the claim altogether, since it seems that in practice the term is used in Texas by unlicensed software engineers. If someone else has a better read here or a source more clearly summarizing, feel free to re-add. Dylnuge ( Talk • Edits) 21:23, 23 June 2023 (UTC)