Brian On Software

I came about this excellent list of ten common myths or suppositions about the field of Software Engineering. The list is maintained by Sahil Thaker. According to him, these are the top ten myths about Software Engineering :

1. Software Engineering is the same as Software Development
2. Software Engineering has no formal basis - it is an art rather than a science
3. Software Engineering is a well-established field
4. Software Engineering involves more testing, requirements analysis, and documentation
5. Practicing UML, MDA, Aspect Oriented Programming, eXtreme Programming makes one a Software Engineer
6. A Software Engineer is he who handles both technical and managerial issues in software development
7. Software Engineers are much too different from Computer Scientists
8. SWEBOK represents the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering
9. Software Engineering is "engineering"
10. Software Engineering is not "engineering"

Would you agree?

As a professional software engineer, I’d have to agree with what he’s saying. Even some professional software organizations, right here in Montreal, have no clue about the difference between software engineering and software development. For example, this year at the University, there were some high tech companies on the campus to recruit co-op students or recent graduates, and most of them were looking for software engineers to code various algorithms in C or C++, design Web sites with the latest buzzword-oriented technology, etc. Hopefully they’ll take a couple of minutes to read the entire article.