Talk:Software engineering/Archive 4

message: *Talk:Software engineering/Archive 1
*Talk:Software engineering/Archive 2
*Talk:Software engineering/Archive 3
:To prepare the article improvement, I have moved the previous talk page to Archive 3. Nevertheless, the whole talk archive (1-3) should be reviewed along with the improvement. --Hans-AC ✉ 15:32, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Previous comments 

message: On May 20, 2005, I proposed Software engineering for the collaboration of the week. I was wrong doing so, because I did not obeye the rule, only nominate articles which don't currently exist or are stubs. Sorry.
Nevertheless, have a look at the comments by ZeWrestler, WB, and Dpbsmith. --Hans-AC ✉ 15:32, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collaboration of the week?? 

message: ; Reason : There is a long discussion on the article with a lot of topics not cleared up to now. In my opinion, the article is not state of the art. It could be structured better and some sections could be moved to articles of its own. It should be a start page for all articles concerning with tthe topic and an introductory article for the WikiReader Software Engineering. Simultaneously, I propose a German collaboration (Qualitätsoffensive).
=== First step: copy to a rework page ===
I have just copied the whole original article to Software engineering/Rework.
Please feel free 
#to do your proposed changes at first in the Rework instead of the original,
#to insert any inline comment and include those comments in /* */
::/* like this */ 
Please contribute to the next steps! --Hans-AC ✉ 16:32, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't you want to move all this stuff below to the Talk:Software engineering/Rework page? Or has the whole thing just fallen into disarray? Brent 01:47, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Wikipedia:Article improvement drive#Software engineering|Article improvement drive]] 

message: I have just copied the whole original article to Software engineering/Rework.
Please feel free 
#to do your proposed changes at first in the Rework instead of the original,
#to insert any inline comment and include those comments in /* */
::/* like this */ 
Please contribute to the next steps! --Hans-AC ✉ 16:32, 26 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Don't you want to move all this stuff below to the Talk:Software engineering/Rework page? Or has the whole thing just fallen into disarray? Brent 01:47, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  First step: copy to a rework page 

message: This page could definitely be improved in the front-matter right at the top.  Software Engineering, as opposed to the formal discipline of Computer Science, puts much more emphasis on the full-lifecycle of development and (potentially long-term) maintenance of a software product.  Whereas most Computer Science-trained folks (those with undergraduate degrees in CS) tend to focus on the programming task -- and Computer Science as a discipline focusses on all the theoretical underpinnings of that task such as algorithm development, language specification, compiler construction, etc.,-- the formal discipline of Software Engineering sees programming as only one aspect of the effective development of a software product.  SE looks at Requirements Engineering, Software Design (high-level and low-level), appropriate design notations, test planning, formal Software Validation and Verification, Test Planning, Test execution, and quite importantly, the (oftentimes much longer and for some pieces of software, more costly) Maintenance phase.
Software Engineering thinks about developing and shiping the product that will meet the customer needs, in the required timeframe, and within the specified budget.
The fact that 60% - %80 of software projects (citation:  the Chaos Study from the Standish Group) fail to meet one or more of these criteria points up the need for considerable growth and advancement in the discipline of SE.
Aside:  the figure of 50 programs granting undergrad degrees sounds way high to me.  In 1997 when I formally researched it, there were only four universities granting such degrees (one was Rochester Institute of Technology; I don't recall the others).  There are many more graduate programs, but I have no idea the number.
I am sorry I don't have time to edit the article page at present, but I'll try to get back to it in the next few months.  The above info is a very quick stab at some needed perspective.  --N2e 16:03, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fifth step: improve contents 

message: Project2501a 20:36, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  *whistles innocently* 

message: I hate to sound like a pedant, but can anyone shed light on the relationship (if any) between the following disciplines (or are they practices?):
* Software engineering
* Software architecture
* Software design
--Richard@lbrc.org 17:07, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Since design is a process as well as a product of that process, where do you make distinction between design and engineering? Oicumayberight 22:28, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  well i see design only as a product. Software engineering also involves design ( as a process) but it involves more, like requiremetns gathering and software testing. TjerkWol 14:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Designers gather requirements and test solutions too, just not in every case. Oicumayberight 18:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Software engineering vs software architecture vs software design? 

message: Sure, at the risk of near certain critique, I'll give it a whirl - but from a bottom up perspective, and including the more foundational term you avoided in this recurring list.
*"Software programming" indicates an activity of forming a software program which means producing at least some piece of a special syntax language (code) that can provide instructions to a computer. Several different languages and techniques are available.
*"Software design", in contrast, indicates an activity of designing, which means forming an arrangement of software components that fulfils some specific purposes. It implies that the software program has achieved a degree of complexity that warrants decomposition into smaller "blocks" or "modules" that require arrangement. This deliberate arrangement attempts to achieve some of its own purposes that are commonly known as design criteria or non-functional requirements, such as safety, performance, maintainability, or simply aesthetics. Preferably there is a documented artefact that describes the "arrangement" and how well it meets its design criteria.
*"Software architecture" is often misunderstood as high level software design, but it actually represents the overall approach taken to the design activity (for example following a multi-threaded distributed task architecture with priority pre-emptive scheduling). These top-level architectural decisions inform the design at every layer of abstraction and must be consistently applied within the intended scope in order to achieve the desired end-results. For example "Baroque" is quite a different building architecture than "Multi-unit efficiency", although each has its own merits and schools of designers. Designs are specific manifestations of those architectures. I can speak about a software architecture without pointing to a particular design.
*"Software engineering" is an engineering discipline that seeks to study the sciences and technologies involved with the practical development of software in order to better apply those sciences and technologies towards greater success. Software engineering includes the practice of defining important terms and relationships between terms (forming relevent ontologies), as well as discussing the merits of the various architectures, designs, and programming languages and techniques that are available. The idea is to form a publically available Body of Knowledge (BOK) about the discipline. There are of course various schools of thought within this BOK. Correct application of software engineering generally depends on possessing detailed knowledge about both the available techniques and the domain area under consideration. The debate about the nature of the SWE BOK (software engineering body of knowledge) is part of the BOK itself. This is also the case for any discipline including philosophy and history.
ThreePD 21:24, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Since design is a process as well as a product of that process, where do you make distinction between design and engineering? Oicumayberight 22:28, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  well i see design only as a product. Software engineering also involves design ( as a process) but it involves more, like requiremetns gathering and software testing. TjerkWol 14:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Designers gather requirements and test solutions too, just not in every case. Oicumayberight 18:19, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Answers to questions of life, the universe, and software engineering

message: Someone keeps modifying the description of Software degrees in the education section to say that 
:About half of all practitioners today have computer science degrees with detailed knowledge of hardware. 
AFAIK, the majority of CS programs do not teach "detailed knowledge of hardware" - hence the term "software degree". Can whoever keeps making this modification provide some kind of evidence that 
# There are a significant number of CS degrees that teach "detailed knowledge of hardware".
# That about half of all SE practitioners have received such degrees.
--Allan McInnes (talk) 14:49, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Education 

message: The material below has been unsourced for a long time. It shouldn't be in the article unless there is a source. (And, saying "reliable statistics are hard to find" is not a substitute for finding them!) Dpbsmith (talk) 16:27, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Economic: In the U.S., software drove about one quarter of all increase in GDP during the 1990s (about $90 billion per year), and one sixth of all productivity growth (efficiency within GDP) during the late 1990s (about $33 billion per year). Software engineering drove $1 trillion of economic and productivity growth over the last decade. Around the world, software drives economic growth in similar ways, though reliable statistics are hard to find.
An anonymous user reinserted the above text, and added a "source" for the statistics. However, after looking at the source in question (Raccoon, L. B. 2001. Definitions and demographics. SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Notes 26, 1 (Jan. 2001), 82-91. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/505894.505914), I have again removed the text in question. The article by Raccoon does not support the text in any way, and in fact does not appear to contain any mention of GDP or economic growth. 
I have also again removed the "peacock statement" on social impact that was reinserted after Dpbsmith removed it. Dpbsmith is right: this is a vacuous "peacock statement". Nor has any source been provided for this statement. --Allan McInnes (talk) 19:13, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unsourced material about economic impact 

message: Re that statement, I meant not that software is often found -- as an essential component-- in missions requiring high reliability (my claw hammer has no software), but rather that software often finds itself in such situations.  That idea is so pervasive that I would think a citation is not needed.  Providing one would be low priority for me (unless I come across one by good chance). Anyone feel free to revise, revert or provide cite. Vincehk 03:09, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If the idea is so pervasive, then it should be easily verifiable :-) --Allan McInnes (talk) 14:57, 27 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pervasiveness in missions requiring 'absolute' reliability 

message: It looks to me as if the "advocacy" definition of software engineering was there before the IEEE definition was added. I thing the IEEE definition should have replaced the advocacy definition, since it is exactly what was being advocated; i.e. "software engineering" did not refer to the advocacy itself but rather to what was being advocated. I would therefore suggest deleting the advocacy definition, but I didn't want to do that without checking, after someone had gone to the effort of finding a citation.
--Boson 17:51, 19 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Advocacy definition 

message: :Image:Software spanner.png is a nice picture, but it is not informational and adds no information to the article. It only adds some aesthetic value. Can we find a picture that adds both aethetics and useful information? NerdyNSK 21:05, 28 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  images 

message: I have added a "" template to the article Syntactic methods, suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but I don't believe it satisfies Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and I've explained why in the deletion notice (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy).  You may contest the proposed deletion by removing the  notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page. Also, please consider improving the article to address the issues raised. Even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Jeepday (talk) 02:18, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Syntactic methods