What is Software Engineering?

When you hear the word “Software”, what is the first thing come into your mind? Probably you might think computer program as software. So what is this Software Engineering?

Just keep software engineering a side. Think about building an apartment housing complex. Definitely you can see the building being built, engineers, works, and some more documents etc. Building apartment complex is governed by civil engineering discipline, where it concern about legal, ethical, security, and environment aspects etc.

Did you think who concern on those aspects? As explained above, you can see the building, but before come to that level, Engineers and architect need to plan, design and get approval from relevant authorities in order start building the complex.

Development of software product can be compared with building an apartment complex. Before start development of your software product you need to plan, design, gather information and get approval like civil engineering discipline. A process is required to develop a software product and we can use Software Engineering as a discipline to manage software development. The software engineering can focus on the cost, effective development of high-quality software systems.

You will think why Software Engineering is important. Actually any other engineering discipline, it could be mechanical, civil, chemical, you can see the product you associate with. But software engineering needs deal with a product which is not tangible and it can not be seen until it is developed.In this lesson we are going to learn the importance of software and software engineering concepts deeply.

You can see that all countries in the world heavily depend on computer systems in almost all the sectors. Software could be a simple order processing or a complex computer –based information system to manage national infrastructures and utilities such as railway system, airline system etc. Industrial manufacturing and distribution is completely computerized. Also all the banks in Sri Lanka use Information System to provide better service to their customers. Therefore you can understand how we depend on software system. Hence producing and maintaining software cost effectively is an essential factor. Software is abstract and intangible which is not constrained by materials, or governed by physical laws or by manufacturing processes.

This simplifies nature of Software Engineering with no physical limitations become software as extremely complex and sometimes difficult to understand. This complex nature led to produce software that is unreliable, delivered late and over the budget.

Hence most of organizations needed to have a way to avoid risks and they followed software engineering techniques for their software development process to produce reliable, high quality software systems within given budget. I hope you have some idea about software engineering right now. I would like to discuss some other area coming with Software that is computer science. Next section we are going to see whether there is a relationship existing with software engineering and computer science.