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# Software engineering

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Already in the 1960s and 1970s, many big software projects went over budget and deadlines in an unexpected manner. This was called the software crisis. It was believed that this was due to the sloppy discipline? of programmers and if they could only learn to work more like mechanical or electrical engineers, the production of software would become as predictable an industry as other branches of engineering, thus was born the term software engineering.

Libraries full of books have been written on the subject. Some of the best have been published by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Methods have improved through the 1980s and 1990s, but complexity in requirements increase fast enough to consume any improvement. One problem is that very many customers are first time customers without previous experience from writing requirements for a software project. If the programmers are very good, the system will work, and the customer will not fully appreciate how complex the task was. There is also a constant eagerness to develop new tools and try the newest tools in each new project.

See also computer science. Exactly where is the border between science, technology, and engineering here?

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Last edited May 10, 2001 11:12 am (diff)
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