The first law of software engineering is that there are no laws of software engineering, at least, yet! As the recently deceased software engineering pioneer Watt S. Humphrey had so succinctly said, “Physicists and engineers make approximations to simplify their work. These approximations are based on known physical laws and verified engineering principles. The software engineer has no Kirchoff’s law or Ohm’s law and no grand concepts like Newtonian mechanics or the theory of relativity”.
Where would the laws of software – when we do discover them – be placed in the pantheon of factors that influence software development? Booch has identified the following levels in the limits of software: influence of politics, impact of economics, importance of organizations, problems of functionality, problems of design, difficulty of distribution, challenges of algorithms, laws of software, and laws of physics.
When we compare the state of the art in software engineering, vis-à-vis other engineering disciplines the following lines of divergence can be noted:
Predictable outcomes – Engineers are focused on ensuring there is lowest possible surprise in the production process so that its outcome can be accurately predicted. On the other hand, software engineers reared in the art of programming and/or computer science research often regard surprises and unpredictability of outcome as key motivators for software development.
Design metrics – Software engineers do not have corresponding metrics for allowable stresses, tolerances, performance ranges, structural complexity, failure probabilities, etc. These are routinely used in other engineering disciplines. Commonly used retrospective measures of software, such as lines of code or performance ranges, may present an oversimplified view of the problem domain.
Failure tolerance – The fundamental aim of any engineering effort is to prevent failure; and when it unfortunately occurs, to learn from it. Software systems fail often and sometimes spectacularly. Yet software engineers do not have an established framework to document and share the lessons from such failures.
Separation of design from implementation – In other engineering disciplines, designers design and handover the ‘blueprints’ to the construction specialists. Software design and implementation together are too closely tied conceptually to enable such a separation. The same software engineer usually has to do both, often simultaneously.
It is wondrous and a little confusing how software engineers manage to create systems of such complexity and criticality in spite of such divergences and without an established set of basic ideas and first principles (enshrined as laws) to fall back upon.
But then, wondrous yes, but confusing, may be not, as structures of immense grandeur and longevity have been built when humans had no inkling of the laws that underpinned such feats of engineering. The pyramids of Egypt are just one example.
Saturday, February 19, 2011
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Software Engineering’s Evolving Journey
For as young a field as software engineering, history is not just something to do with the past. It is also very much what is unfolding in the present. Computing is becoming faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous. This speed often leaves us cold and confused: How do I know whether what I learn today will have any value tomorrow? Addressing this question lies at the crux of learning a little bit of software engineering’s history. A basic historical awareness can make us ready for change and what it means for individual careers, as well as the collective profession.
Some of the trends that have influenced software engineering and continue to do so can be summarized as:
Programming to software engineering – Programming plays a significant role in software development. This role has been redefined continuously with the evolution of software engineering. From a pre-eminently central position, programming has moved to be one of the concerns for the software developer.
Hardware-software: from coupling to congress – In the early days of computing, software was hardly recognized as something different from hardware. Then, much of the instruction needed to run a computer was hard-wired into the hardware. Additional instructions that came via software were specific to the hardware. When hardware was sold, software came with it; almost no one sold or bought software by itself. Compare that with the present; probably the operating system is the only piece of software now that comes with the hardware we buy. Almost every other application software for general use —those that let us do all those fun and useful things—is acquired and installed separately, often downloaded from the Web for free. The erstwhile coupling between hardware and software can be said to have been replaced by something of a congress.
Advent of High-Level Languages – What has changed profoundly over the past few decades is how we communicate with computers. What has brought about this change is the vehicle of communication: language. Very simply, the so-called high-level languages are programming languages whose syntax and idiom are closer to that of English. High-level programming languages let one be a programmer without being able to communicate in machine or assembly language. This caused an explosion in the number of programmers, which widened the scope of the software engineering profession.
Advent of the Personal Computer – It is estimated that more than one billion personal computers (PC) are in use in the world now. Certainly a far cry from that mere handful they were expected to sell in the early 1980s. Computers have come from being isolated, redoubtable behemoths, to portable, friendly devices sitting on our desks or being carried around in hand bags. Concomitantly, there has been exponential growth in the amount, variety, scope, and power of the software that needs to support what we do with those ‘personal’ computing machines today. With the coming of the PC and its many subsequent variants, software engineers have become ever busier.
Global Software Development – As the Web’s presence increased throughout the 1990s and then into the new millennium, software engineering became a truly global enterprise. It is customary now for the customers, users, developers and managers of a software project to be dispersed across continents, time zones, and cultures. This makes software development something of a unique enterprise. In today’s typical software projects, development proceeds round-the-clock, through the collaboration of offshore and onsite team members. Global software development has deep economic as well as social implications within and without the software engineering profession.
Return of Open Source – Very simply, open source is about sharing the source code (as well as executables) of software developed by a particular group or individual for free, so that others can use or modify the code without paying any royalties. Open source was nothing special in the initial era of computing. Companies sold hardware, and the software came with it, for free. Academics shared code just as they shared ideas. When software became a commercial commodity in its own right, large corporations made every effort to stifle the free flow of code. The coming of the Web in the early 1990s gave open source aficionados the fast, reliable, and cheap media they needed to connect and build exciting and useful software. And then give it away for free. This is how open source returned, after being in exile for many years. Other than being an affirmation of intellectual freedom, the open source paradigm led to the re-examination of many fundamental principles of software development. Corporations large and small have come to recognize the power of open source and are keen to leverage it. Open source has fundamentally changed software development, and the change is here to stay.
The interplay of these trends – many of which overlap and influence one another – have shaped software engineering’s evolving journey. These are living trends, and they beget newer trends.
Some of the trends that have influenced software engineering and continue to do so can be summarized as:
Programming to software engineering – Programming plays a significant role in software development. This role has been redefined continuously with the evolution of software engineering. From a pre-eminently central position, programming has moved to be one of the concerns for the software developer.
Hardware-software: from coupling to congress – In the early days of computing, software was hardly recognized as something different from hardware. Then, much of the instruction needed to run a computer was hard-wired into the hardware. Additional instructions that came via software were specific to the hardware. When hardware was sold, software came with it; almost no one sold or bought software by itself. Compare that with the present; probably the operating system is the only piece of software now that comes with the hardware we buy. Almost every other application software for general use —those that let us do all those fun and useful things—is acquired and installed separately, often downloaded from the Web for free. The erstwhile coupling between hardware and software can be said to have been replaced by something of a congress.
Advent of High-Level Languages – What has changed profoundly over the past few decades is how we communicate with computers. What has brought about this change is the vehicle of communication: language. Very simply, the so-called high-level languages are programming languages whose syntax and idiom are closer to that of English. High-level programming languages let one be a programmer without being able to communicate in machine or assembly language. This caused an explosion in the number of programmers, which widened the scope of the software engineering profession.
Advent of the Personal Computer – It is estimated that more than one billion personal computers (PC) are in use in the world now. Certainly a far cry from that mere handful they were expected to sell in the early 1980s. Computers have come from being isolated, redoubtable behemoths, to portable, friendly devices sitting on our desks or being carried around in hand bags. Concomitantly, there has been exponential growth in the amount, variety, scope, and power of the software that needs to support what we do with those ‘personal’ computing machines today. With the coming of the PC and its many subsequent variants, software engineers have become ever busier.
Global Software Development – As the Web’s presence increased throughout the 1990s and then into the new millennium, software engineering became a truly global enterprise. It is customary now for the customers, users, developers and managers of a software project to be dispersed across continents, time zones, and cultures. This makes software development something of a unique enterprise. In today’s typical software projects, development proceeds round-the-clock, through the collaboration of offshore and onsite team members. Global software development has deep economic as well as social implications within and without the software engineering profession.
Return of Open Source – Very simply, open source is about sharing the source code (as well as executables) of software developed by a particular group or individual for free, so that others can use or modify the code without paying any royalties. Open source was nothing special in the initial era of computing. Companies sold hardware, and the software came with it, for free. Academics shared code just as they shared ideas. When software became a commercial commodity in its own right, large corporations made every effort to stifle the free flow of code. The coming of the Web in the early 1990s gave open source aficionados the fast, reliable, and cheap media they needed to connect and build exciting and useful software. And then give it away for free. This is how open source returned, after being in exile for many years. Other than being an affirmation of intellectual freedom, the open source paradigm led to the re-examination of many fundamental principles of software development. Corporations large and small have come to recognize the power of open source and are keen to leverage it. Open source has fundamentally changed software development, and the change is here to stay.
The interplay of these trends – many of which overlap and influence one another – have shaped software engineering’s evolving journey. These are living trends, and they beget newer trends.
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