Software engineering in Asia

Asia boasts a growing software industry spread across several countries. However, software technology in Asia still lags behind the US. To become competitive in the global marketplace, many Asian countries have started to improve their university systems and software-development industries. If successful, by 2001 their efforts will create an Asian software industry quite different from today's. The authors survey these efforts and sketch briefly the history of software development in each country. They survey recent trends in Asian software engineering from the industrial, educational, and organizational viewpoints, and offer an optimistic assessment of efforts toward modernization and regional cooperation     

Software engineering and the law

For good or otherwise, the legal system has discovered the world of computers and its practitioners. Anyone opening a daily newspaper knows that litigation involving computers and software has exploded in recent years. On balance, the net effect of this attention might be positive because it gives practitioners an economic incentive to improve the way we work. Indeed, lawyers might well be the ones who provide the incentives for realistic contractual commitments, worst-case software engineering development practices, and a total organizational commitment to quality. Something similar happened to the US automobile industry, benefiting both car makers and the public     

Software engineering education

A primary charter of TCSE is supporting and promoting software engineering education. The paper looks at the major issues in SEE and their goals.     

Software engineering technology watch

Predicting the evolution of software engineering technology is, at best, a dubious proposition; most typically, it is a frustrating exercise in disappointment and anxiety. It is not difficult to see why: the evolution of software technology is fast paced, and is determined by a dizzying array of factors, many of them outside the arena of software engineering, and most of them cannot be identified, let alone predicted, with any significant advance notice. In this paper, we briefly discuss our first ventures in this domain, and some (very) preliminary conclusions and resolutions.     

Software engineering technology watch

Predicting the evolution of software engineering technology is, at best, a dubious proposition; it is fast paced and determined by an array of factors, many of them outside the software engineering arena. The authors discuss their first ventures in this domain and preliminary conclusions. The goal of watching software engineering trends means to determine what information we must gather and maintain to gain a comprehensive view of the discipline and its evolution. This information must be sufficiently rich to support discipline-wide assessments and trend-specific analysis. The authors identified a number of software engineering-specific and technology-related indicators, which they divided into seven categories which are presented.     

Software engineering grows up

The author discusses licensing in the software engineering profession. If software professionals do not participate in defining licensing and other regulation mechanisms, they could find themselves at the mercy of laws designed to protect segments of industry or to increase the reach of professional organizations that do not represent them     

Software engineering in a developing country

Abstract

As the world marks twenty years of Software Engineering, this note examines the practice and impact of the discipline in a typical developing country. The training, job requirements, exposure and experience of software engineers are also appraised against this background.     

Software systems development in petroleum engineering

Many approaches to designing software systems have been developed for use in commercial or business environments. These development methods and procedures have improved dramatically over the last ten years although it is only recently that these have been employed in scientific and technological applications. Many of these implementations have been unsuccessful because the design methodology has been divorced from the practical requirements of the industry in which the software system is to operate. This paper discusses a modern approach to software development which directly relates to an engineering environment and which is designed to satisfy practical criteria of acceptability of the software when delivered to the petroleum engineer. Since all field developments nowadays rely heavily on associated software systems, the approach presented here can lead to improved mechanical systems reliability and shorter development/design cycles.     

Software engineering in a development group

Productivity data are presented for a typical software development group working in small project teams. The wider aspects of productivity, including maintenance and release procedures, are considered. The group worked extensively with subcontractors, developing products by reusing software. The effect of this on the resulting products and the productivity is analysed: increased reliability was observed to be a consequence of software reuse, compared with first implementations.     

Software engineering as a scientific and engineering discipline

A new interpretation of software engineering from scientific, engineering, and practical standpoints is proposed. Software engineering is defined as a successor of programming and computer science, namely, its management theory. Features and attributes of software engineering as an original discipline are founded. The structure, content, and concepts of this discipline and its basic elements are presented. __________ Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 3, pp. 19–28, May–June 2008.     

Software engineering programs for the next century

The field of software engineering and its subdisciplines have grown tremendously in the past six years. IEEE Computer Society conferences and working committees have helped this process by greatly increasing information dissemination and the opportunity to publish quality work in many topic areas. These activities are coordinated by the Technical Council on Software Engineering, an international voluntary organization consisting of Computer Society members and others interested in promoting the field. The author looks at the work of the council which provides a forum for the exchange of ideas among interested practitioners, researchers, developers, maintainers, and students throughout the world