History of software engineering

The evolution of software engineering is notable in a number of areas:

• Emergence as a profession: By the early 1980s software engineering had already emerged as a bona fide profession,"Software engineering … has recently emerged as a discipline in its own right."

{{cite book

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| title=Software Engineering

| publisher=Addison-Wesley

| year=1985

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| isbn = 978-0-201-14229-7

}} to stand beside computer science and traditional engineering.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

• Role of women: Before 1970 men filling the more prestigious and better paying hardware engineering roles often delegated the writing of software to women, and legends such as Grace Hopper or Margaret Hamilton filled many computer programming jobs.{{Cite book|title=Recoding Gender|url=https://archive.org/details/recodinggenderwo00abba|url-access=limited|last=Abbate|first=Janet|publisher=MIT Press|year=2012|isbn=978-0262534536|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=[https://archive.org/details/recodinggenderwo00abba/page/n47 39]}}{{Cite book|title=The Computer Boys Take Over|last=Ensmenger|first=Nathan|publisher=MIT Press|year=2012|isbn=978-0262517966|location=Cambridge, MA}}
  Today, fewer women work in software engineering than in other professions, a situation whose cause is not clearly identified. Many academic and professional organizations {{Who|date=February 2015}} consider this situation unbalanced and are trying hard to solve it.{{Cite web|url=https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/17/356944145/episode-576-when-women-stopped-coding|title=Episode 576: When Women Stopped Coding|date=Oct 17, 2014|website=NPR Planet Money|access-date=June 27, 2018}}
• Processes: Processes have become a big part of software engineering. They are hailed for their potential to improve software but sharply criticized for their potential to constrict programmers.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}
• Cost of hardware: The relative cost of software versus hardware has changed substantially over the last 50 years. When mainframes were expensive and required large support staffs, the few organizations buying them also had the resources to fund large, expensive custom software engineering projects. Computers are now much more numerous and much more powerful, which has several effects on software. The larger market can support large projects to create commercial off the shelf software, as done by companies such as Microsoft. The cheap machines allow each programmer to have a terminal capable of fairly rapid compilation. The programs in question can use techniques such as garbage collection, which make them easier and faster for the programmer to write. On the other hand, many fewer organizations are interested in employing programmers for large custom software projects, instead using commercial off the shelf software as much as possible.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

Early usages for the term software engineering include a 1965 letter from ACM president Anthony Oettinger,{{cite web |last=Meyer |first=Bertrand |author-link=Bertrand Meyer |date=April 4, 2013 |title=The origin of "software engineering" |url=https://bertrandmeyer.com/2013/04/04/the-origin-of-software-engineering/ |access-date=2016-11-25}}{{cite book |last=Tadre |first=Matti |title=The Science of Computing |date=2014-12-03 |publisher=CRC Press |isbn=978-1-4822-1770-4 |page=121}} lectures by Douglas T. Ross at MIT in the 1950s.{{cite journal |last=Mahoney |first=Michael |title=The Roots of Software Engineering |url=http://thecorememory.com/TROSE.pdf |journal=CWI Quarterly |volume=3 |issue=4 |pages=325–334 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110220235133/http://thecorememory.com/TROSE.pdf |access-date=Feb 10, 2023|archive-date=2011-02-20 }} Margaret H. Hamilton is the person who came up with the idea of naming the discipline, software engineering, as a way of giving it legitimacy during the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer.{{cite web |author=2018 International Conference on Software Engineering celebrating its 40th anniversary, and 50 years of Software engineering |title=ICSE 2018 - Plenary Sessions - Margaret Hamilton |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbVOF0Uk5lU |access-date=9 Jun 2018 |website=YouTube|date=31 May 2018 }}{{cite web |last=Rayl |first=A.J.S. |date=October 16, 2008 |title=NASA Engineers and Scientists-Transforming Dreams Into Reality |url=http://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/scientists.html |access-date=2016-11-25 |work=NASA 50th anniversary website |publisher=NASA |archive-date=2010-06-29 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100629170224/http://www1.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/scientists.html |url-status=dead }}

{{Blockquote|text=I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it—and those building it—would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term 'software engineering' to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline|author=Margaret Hamilton|title=2014 interview with El País{{Cite web |title=First Software Engineer {{!}} IEEE Computer Society |date=5 October 2018 |url=https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/events/what-to-know-about-the-scientist-who-invented-the-term-software-engineering/ |access-date=2023-03-05 |language=en-US}}}}

The NATO Science Committee sponsored two conferences{{cite web |author=Brian Randell |author-link=Brian Randell |date=2001 |title=NATO Software Engineering Conferences |url=http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/ |access-date=2016-11-25 |publisher=ncl.ac.uk}} on software engineering in 1968 (Garmisch, Germany) and 1969, which gave the field its initial boost. Many believe these conferences marked the official start of the profession of software engineering.{{cite web |last=King |first=Jared |date=2016 |title=Jared King's "The History of Software" |url=https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=12353 |access-date=2016-11-25 |work=CS302: Software Engineering |publisher=Saylor.org |archive-date=2018-11-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181119005709/https://learn.saylor.org/mod/page/view.php?id=12353 |url-status=dead }}

Software engineering was spurred by the so-called software crisis of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, which identified many of the problems of software development. Many projects ran over budget and schedule. Some projects caused property damage. Through negligence in publishing software with critical bugs, some lost their lives due to software failures. One of the most striking examples of harm through software bugs was the Therac-25 race condition bug. The bug caused a radiation therapy machine to administer overdoses of radiation in cases where low doses should have been used. The software crisis was originally defined in terms of productivity, but evolved to emphasize quality. Some used the term software crisis to refer to their inability to hire enough qualified programmers.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}} During this time, Silicon Valley cemented itself as the best location for software engineers to work.{{Cite journal |last=Saxenian |first=Annalee |date=1983 |title=The Genesis of Silicon Valley |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/23286110 |journal=Built Environment |volume=9 |issue=1 |pages=7–17 |jstor=23286110 |issn=0263-7960}}

• Cost and Budget Overruns: The OS/360 operating system was a classic example. This decade-long project from the 1960s eventually produced one of the most complex software systems at the time. OS/360 was one of the first large (1000 programmers{{Citation needed|date=October 2007}}) software projects. Fred Brooks claims in The Mythical Man-Month that he made a multimillion-dollar mistake of not developing a coherent architecture before starting development.
• Property Damage: Software defects can cause property damage. Poor software security allows hackers to steal identities, costing time, money, and reputations.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}
• Life and Death: Software defects can kill. Embedded systems used in radiotherapy machines prove the ability to fail so catastrophically that they administered lethal doses of radiation to patients. The most famous of these failures are the Therac-25 incidents.{{Cite journal|title = An investigation of the Therac-25 accidents|journal = Computer|date = 1993-07-01|issn = 0018-9162|pages = 18–41|volume = 26|issue = 7|doi = 10.1109/MC.1993.274940|first1 = N.G.|last1 = Leveson|first2 = C.S.|last2 = Turner|citeseerx = 10.1.1.372.412|s2cid = 9691171}}

Peter G. Neumann has kept a contemporary list of software problems and disasters.{{cite journal|url=http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks|title=RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest|journal=The Risks Digest|last1=Neumann |first1=Peter G. }} The software crisis has been fading from view, because it is psychologically extremely difficult to remain in crisis mode for a protracted period (more than 20 years). Nevertheless, software – especially real-time embedded software – remains risky and is pervasive, and it is crucial not to give in to complacency. Over the last 10–15 years Michael A. Jackson has written extensively about the nature of software engineering, has identified the main source of its difficulties as lack of specialization, and has suggested that his problem frames provide the basis for a "normal practice" of software engineering, a prerequisite if software engineering is to become an engineering science.Michael Jackson, "Engineering and Software Engineering" in S Nanz ed, The Future of Software Engineering, Springer Verlag 2010; Michael Jackson, Problem Frames: Analyzing and Structuring Software Development Problems; Addison-Wesley, 2001

One of the largest projects undertaken by software engineers during this time period was the development of modern operating systems. Starting in Bell Labs and then moving to UC Berkeley, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, among other software engineers, worked to create Unix V6 in 1975. Unix V6 was a landmark operating system that set standards for future operating systems and is used today to educate students about proper operating system principles.{{Cite journal |last1=Kominácká |first1=Jitka |last2=Kominácký |first2=Ladislav |date=2016 |title=Význam hodnoty lokality jako nedílný indikátor kvality života specifického regionu |url=https://doi.org/10.5817/cz.muni.p210-8273-2016-79 |journal=XIX. mezinárodní kolokvium o regionálních vědách. Sborník příspěvků. |location=Brno |publisher=Masaryk university |pages=621–627 |doi=10.5817/cz.muni.p210-8273-2016-79|isbn=978-80-210-8272-4 }} Moreover, future operating systems built on Unix V6's methods, and its descendants can be grouped into five types of operating system paradigms: Grassroots Systems, Large-Scale Systems, Hybrid Systems, Experimental Systems, and Minor Systems.{{Cite journal |last=Lauer |first=Hugh C. |date=1981-12-01 |title=Observations on the development of an operating system |url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1067627.806588 |journal=SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. |volume=15 |issue=5 |pages=30–36 |doi=10.1145/1067627.806588 |issn=0163-5980|url-access=subscription }} In contrast with Unix, software engineers at MIT in 1983 built GNU (literally "GNU's Not Unix") as an open source alternative to Unix. As an early open source software, GNU was beloved by a small group of developers and its work grew the open source software development community in the 80s.{{Cite journal |last=Bretthauer |first=David |date=2001-12-26 |title=Open Source Software: A History |url=https://digitalcommons.lib.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/7/ |journal=Published Works}}

For decades, solving the software crisis was paramount to researchers and companies producing software tools.

The cost of owning and maintaining software in the 1980s was twice as expensive as developing the software.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

• During the 1990s, the cost of ownership and maintenance increased by 30% over the 1980s.
• In 1995, statistics showed that half of surveyed development projects were operational, but were not considered successful.
• The average software project overshoots its schedule by half.
• Three-quarters of all large software products delivered to the customer are failures that are either not used at all, or do not meet the customer's requirements.

Seemingly, every new technology and practice from the 1970s through the 1990s was trumpeted as a silver bullet to solve the software crisis. Tools, discipline, formal methods, process, and professionalism were touted as silver bullets:{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

• Tools: Especially emphasized were tools: structured programming, object-oriented programming, CASE tools such as ICL's CADES CASE system,D.J.Pearson "The use and abuse of a software engineering system" National Computer Conference 1979 Ada, documentation, and standards were touted as silver bullets.
• Discipline: Some pundits argued that the software crisis was due to the lack of discipline of programmers.
• Formal methods: Some believed that if formal engineering methodologies would be applied to software development, then production of software would become as predictable an industry as other branches of engineering. They advocated proving all programs correct.
• Process: Many advocated the use of defined processes and methodologies like the Capability Maturity Model.
• Professionalism: This led to work on a code of ethics, licenses, and professionalism.

In 1986, Fred Brooks published his No Silver Bullet article, arguing that no individual technology or practice would ever make a 10-fold improvement in productivity within 10 years.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

Debate about silver bullets raged over the following decade. Advocates for Ada, components, and processes continued arguing for years that their favorite technology would be a silver bullet. Skeptics disagreed. Eventually, almost everyone accepted that no silver bullet would ever be found. Yet, claims about silver bullets pop up now and again, even today.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

Some{{who|date=February 2016}} interpret{{why|date=February 2016}} no silver bullet to mean that software engineering failed.{{clarify|date=February 2016}} However, with further reading, Brooks goes on to say: "We will surely make substantial progress over the next 40 years; an order of magnitude over 40 years is hardly magical ..."{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

The search for a single key to success never worked. All known technologies and practices have only made incremental improvements to productivity and quality. Yet, there are no silver bullets for any other profession, either. Others interpret no silver bullet as proof that software engineering has finally matured and recognized that projects succeed due to hard work.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

However, it could also be said that there are, in fact, a range of silver bullets today, including lightweight methodologies (see "Project management"), spreadsheet calculators, customized browsers, in-site search engines, database report generators, integrated design-test coding-editors with memory/differences/undo, and specialty shops that generate niche software, such as information web sites, at a fraction of the cost of totally customized web site development. Nevertheless, the field of software engineering appears too complex and diverse for a single "silver bullet" to improve most issues, and each issue accounts for only a small portion of all software problems.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

The rise of the Internet led to very rapid growth in the demand for international information display/e-mail systems on the World Wide Web. Programmers were required to handle illustrations, maps, photographs, and other images, plus simple animation, at a rate never before seen, with few well-known methods to optimize image display/storage (such as the use of thumbnail images).{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

The growth of browser usage, running on the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), changed the way in which information-display and retrieval was organized. The widespread network connections led to the growth and prevention of international computer viruses on MS Windows computers, and the vast proliferation of spam e-mail became a major design issue in e-mail systems, flooding communication channels and requiring semi-automated pre-screening. Keyword-search systems evolved into web-based search engines, and many software systems had to be re-designed, for international searching, depending on search engine optimization (SEO) . Human natural-language translation systems were needed to attempt to translate the information flow in multiple foreign languages, with many software systems being designed for multi-language usage, based on design concepts from human translators. Typical computer-user bases went from hundreds, or thousands of users, to, often, many-millions of international users.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

With the expanding demand for software in many smaller organizations, the need for inexpensive software solutions led to the growth of simpler, faster methodologies that developed running software, from requirements to deployment, quicker & easier. The use of rapid-prototyping evolved to entire lightweight methodologies, such as Extreme Programming (XP), which attempted to simplify many areas of software engineering, including requirements gathering and reliability testing for the growing, vast number of small software systems. Very large software systems still used heavily documented methodologies, with many volumes in the documentation set; however, smaller systems had a simpler, faster alternative approach to managing the development and maintenance of software calculations and algorithms, information storage/retrieval and display.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

Software engineering is a young discipline, and is still developing. The directions in which software engineering is developing include:{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

Aspects help software engineers deal with quality attributes by providing tools to add or remove boilerplate code from many areas in the source code. Aspects describe how all objects or functions should behave in particular circumstances. For example, aspects can add debugging, logging, or locking control into all objects of particular types. Researchers are currently working to understand how to use aspects to design general-purpose code. Related concepts include generative programming and templates.

Experimental software engineering is a branch of software engineering interested in devising experiments on software, in collecting data from the experiments, and in devising laws and theories from this data.

Software product lines, aka product family engineering, is a systematic way to produce families of software systems, instead of creating a succession of completely individual products. This method emphasizes extensive, systematic, formal code reuse, to try to industrialize the software development process.

The Future of Software Engineering conference (FOSE), held at ICSE 2000, documented the state of the art of SE in 2000 and listed many problems to be solved over the next decade. The FOSE tracks at the ICSE 2000 {{cite web|url=http://www.ul.ie/%7Eicse2000/|title=ICSE2000: Call for Participation|work=ul.ie}} and the ICSE 2007{{cite web|url=http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/icse07/|title=ICSE 2007: Home|work=ucl.ac.uk}} conferences also help identify the state of the art in software engineering.{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

The profession is trying to define its boundary and content. The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge SWEBOK has been tabled as an ISO standard during 2006 (ISO/IEC TR 19759).{{citation needed|date=February 2016}}

In 2006, Money Magazine and Salary.com rated software engineering as the best job in America in terms of growth, pay, stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field.{{cite web

| last = Kalwarski

| first = Tara |author2=Daphne Mosher |author3=Janet Paskin |author4=Donna Rosato |author4-link=Donna Rosato | year = 2006

| url = https://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/2006/

| title = Best Jobs in America

| work = MONEY Magazine

| publisher = CNN

| access-date = 2006-04-20

}}, "MONEY Magazine and Salary.com researched hundreds of jobs, considering their growth, pay, stress-levels and other factors. These careers ranked highest. 1. Software Engineer..."

A wide variety of platforms has allowed different aspects of AI to develop, ranging from expert systems such as Cyc to deep learning to robot platforms such as the Roomba with open interface.{{cite web|url=http://hackingroomba.com/|title=Hacking Roomba|work=hackingroomba.com|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091018023300/http://hackingroomba.com/|archive-date=18 October 2009|df=dmy-all}} Recent advances in deep artificial neural networks and distributed computing have led to a proliferation of software libraries, including Deeplearning4j, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.

A 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study found a shortage of 1.5 million highly trained data and AI professionals and managers{{cite journal |last1=Manyika |first1=James |first2=Michael |last2=Chui |first3=Jaques |last3=Bughin |first4=Brad |last4=Brown |first5=Richard |last5=Dobbs |first6=Charles |last6=Roxburgh |first7=Angela Hung |last7=Byers |title=Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity |publisher=McKinsey Global Institute |date=May 2011 |url=http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Big_data_The_next_frontier_for_innovation |access-date=16 January 2016 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130306232114/http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation |archive-date=6 March 2013 |df=dmy-all }} and a number of private bootcamps have developed programs to meet that demand, including free programs like The Data Incubator or paid programs like General Assembly.{{cite news

|title = NY gets new boot camp for data scientists: It's free but harder to get into than Harvard

|newspaper = Venture Beat

|access-date = 21 February 2016

|url = https://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/ny-gets-new-bootcamp-for-data-scientists-its-free-but-harder-to-get-into-than-harvard/

|url-status = live

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20160215235820/http://venturebeat.com/2014/04/15/ny-gets-new-bootcamp-for-data-scientists-its-free-but-harder-to-get-into-than-harvard/

|archive-date = 15 February 2016

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{{Main|List of programming languages for artificial intelligence}}

Early symbolic AI inspired Lisp and Prolog, which dominated early AI programming. Modern AI development often uses mainstream languages such as Python or C++,{{cite web|title=C++ Java|work=InfoWorld |url=https://www.infoworld.com/article/3186599/artificial-intelligence/the-5-best-programming-languages-for-ai-development.html|publisher=infoworld.com|access-date=6 December 2017 |last1=Pointer |first1=Ian }} or niche languages such as Wolfram Language.{{cite news|last1=Ferris|first1=Robert|title=How Steve Jobs' friend changed the world of math|url=https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/07/stephen-wolfram-why-this-brilliant-physicist-ditched-his-job.html|access-date=28 February 2018|work=CNBC|date=7 April 2016}}

• Charles Bachman (1924–2017) is particularly known for his work in the area of databases.
• László Bélády (1928–2021) the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering in the 1980s.
• Fred Brooks (born 1931) best known for managing the development of OS/360.
• Peter Chen (born 1947) known for the development of entity–relationship modeling.
• Edsger W. Dijkstra (1930–2002) developed the framework for a form of structured programming.
• David Parnas (born 1941) developed the concept of information hiding in modular programming.
• Michael A. Jackson (born 1936) software engineering methodologist responsible for JSP method of program design; JSD method of system development (with John Cameron); and Problem Frames approach for analysing and structuring software development problems.
• Richard Stallman, created the GNU system utilities and championed free software.

• History of software
• History of computer science
• History of programming languages

{{Reflist}}

• [http://purl.umn.edu/107103 Oral history interview with Bruce H. Barnes], Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Barnes describes the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its support of research in theoretical computer science, computer architecture, numerical methods, and software engineering, and the development of networking.
• [http://purl.umn.edu/107110 Oral history interview with Laszlo A. Belady], Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.

{{Software engineering}}

Category:Software engineering

Software engineering

Category:History of computing

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