What is software engineering

In this article, I'll share my personal take on the difference between software development and software engineering (SE). It is a personal opinion, so take it with a grain of salt.

This content is part of my Dev Concepts series of books.

So what is it about?

Many people may tell you that both terms refer to the same concept. Personally, I don't agree. The way I see things, software development is the "what" (i.e., the activity) and software engineering is broader; it corresponds to the "what" and the "how" (i.e., the process, the approaches, the methodologies, etc).

I like the definition of the IEEE standards body:

To create software, we perform various activities, and how we approach those activities has a huge impact on the results and on the overall quality. Writing code is only a part of the story. There are many more activities around coding. For instance, before coding, we need to understand user needs (i.e., their requirements). Then, we need to clarify the business rules (e.g., is X accepted or not, when, how, why), the workflows (e.g., what happens before/after X), the data models (i.e., what concepts/data will the application manipulate), the data flows, etc. Still before coding, we also need to architect and design the solution so that it is built on solid grounds.

The coding part itself is also critical of course, and there are many dimensions/things to take care of. Security is also something of the utmost importance. Finally, once code has been written for an application, it needs to be built, tested/validated, released, deployed, monitored, maintained, etc. My Dev Concepts series of books as a whole discusses those topics.

Luckily, there's actually a generally accepted standard defining a set of phases for software development projects. It is called the Software/System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Personally, I think that all software developers should clearly understand the SDLC and apply it in their projects, whether big or small.

Next to the software development phases, there are other things to consider like the software development approaches/methodologies (e.g., Agile, XP, etc) and project management techniques (e.g., PMBOK), which greatly impact the way we work, and collaborate with each other.

To finish this short post, I'll leave you with a wonderful quote from Margaret Hamilton, one of the pioneers of software engineering:

References

• The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick Brooks. That book has deeply influenced me as a crafter
• Software engineering @ Wikipedia
• What is software engineering
• Software engineering glossary: IEEE Software Engineering glossary @ MIT
• SDLC @ Wikipedia

Conclusion

In this short article, I've introduced the notion of software engineering. It's just an idea, a simple concept. And that's the magic; if you learn the concepts one by one, then you'll quickly become one of us, a software crafter. It's not that hard; it's like everything, it just takes time.

That’s it for today!

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