A Baker's Dozen: 13 Software Engineering Challenges

Software engineering has developed over the last few decades into a discipline of many diverse areas of interest. Examples include testing, programming, design, architecture, maintenance, metrics and evolution. Specialty conferences and publications proliferate, stay for a short time, and then disappear, while software engineering remains as nontraditional engineering - part craft, part art, and part logic. This article describes 13 challenges faced by software engineering research and practitioner community, and hints on what to do about them. The challenges include: (1) software quality, (2) return on investment, (3) process improvement, (4) metrics and measurement, (5) standards confusion, (6) standards interoperability, (7) legacy software, (8) testing stoppage criteria, (9) interoperability and composability, (10) operational profiles, (11) designing in, (12) product certification, (13) services.