Why there is tendency towards painting the process of making, using and maintaining software, necessarily as an “engineering” pursuit? Where do you see making software has parallels with say … producing a car or a building a bridge?

Coming to civil engineering … software is reified, invisible, can’t see, touch… does that make a difference?

software gets made and used in a “social sciences” environment with very little parallels with engineering.

It is the time that we stop comparing software as an engineered product…

Shrini

The biggest difference between software engineers and “typical” engineers is the size of our problem set. Many of the classical problems of typical engineering have been solved before: building a bridge, building an airplane, etc. There are also typically a limited number of ways that a user can use a classical engineering solution (how many ways can a user typically stress a bridge?).

However, in software engineering, the problems vary widely–we seem to find new problems to solve every day. We’ve solved some of the simpler problems, but there is no end to the way that users can attempt to abuse our creations. We have little choice but to use some artistry to determine how users are likely to try using our software. Even for those cases where only one user out of thousands tries something, as software engineers, we try to anticipate these unexpected uses.

Good post, as always!