Software engineering

Article By:

Gupta, Pranshu Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, DeSales University, Center Valley, Pennsylvania.

Last reviewed:November 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.631400

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• Software engineering, published July 2015:Download PDF Get Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Software engineering, published June 2014:Download PDF Get Adobe Acrobat Reader

The production of software through a progression of disciplined and controlled steps. As the need for complex, real-time, and life-critical software proliferates, there is a demand for an effective software development process that guarantees the correctness and quality of the software produced. To meet this challenge, the computer science community has developed a process called software engineering that aims to build software that meets all the specifications for its intended use. The term engineering requires that software be produced with the objective of delivering a successful final product with as much certainty as that of civil engineers constructing a building or a road. For this reason, it is necessary that software engineers design software with a full understanding of the intended design and the certainty of its correctness and reliability of operation in a specific operating environment. In other words, software engineers should aim to develop the counterpart of the civil engineer's “blueprints” to guarantee the functionality, correctness, and behavior of the required software. However, whereas civil engineers have been constructing roads, buildings, and bridges for centuries, software has been built only since the early 1940s. For this reason, software engineering is an evolving discipline for manufacturing software systems that, in a typical modern configuration, have many interacting software and hardware components, with the purpose of accomplishing specific tasks, and that include, as an essential component of the final system, documentation to substantiate the needs of the system and how it operates (Fig. 1). See also: Software

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