Blog Journeys of a Lifelong Learner

Software engineering is not engineering. As a software developer, I would love nothing more than to say I am an engineer. Engineers think through and build things that are supposed to work the first time due to careful planning. So having the word “engineer” in my job title would be very cool indeed.

Let's look at what would happen if the normal software engineering approach were applied to aerospace engineering. A plane is sitting at a gate boarding passengers, and an aerospace engineer—on a whim or forced by management—decides to replace the tail section. Because it’s just a tail section, let’s just rip it off and stick another one on right there at the gate. No problem, we can make it work! If aerospace engineering were approached like software engineering, I think the passengers would stampede to get off that plane as fast as possible. But those are the kind of changes that are made every day in major software projects the world over. The old joke is that “military intelligence” is an oxymoron, but I’d have to say that it fits “software engineering” as well. What makes this even more troubling to me is that software truly rules the world, but the approach nearly everyone takes to making it can in no way be called engineering.

From Solid Code: Optimizing the Software Development Lifecycle