1. 1945-1965: The Beginning
The term software engineering first appeared
in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Programmers have always known about civil,
electrical, and computer engineering and
debated what engineering might mean for
software.
The NATO Science Committee sponsored two
conferences on software engineering in 1968
and 1969, which gave the field its initial boost.
Many believe these conferences marked the
official start of the profession of software
engineering.
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2. 1965-1985: The Software Crisis
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 software projects ran over budget and schedule. Some projects
caused property damage.
A few projects caused loss of life. 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.
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3. •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)
software projects. Fred Brooks claims in The Mythical Man Month that he made a
multi-million 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.
•Life and Death: Software defects can kill. Some embedded systems used in
radiotherapy machines failed so catastrophically that they administered lethal doses of
radiation to patients. The most famous of these failures is the //Therac 25// incident.
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4. 1985-1989: Silver Bullets
For decades, solving the software crisis was paramount to
researchers and companies producing software tools.
Seemingly, they trumpeted every new technology and
practice from the 1970s to the 1990s as a "silver bullet" to
solve the software crisis. Tools, discipline, formal methods,
process, and professionalism were touted as silver bullets:
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5. •Tools: Especially emphasized were tools: structured programming, object-oriented
programming, CASE tools, 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.
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6. 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.
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.
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7. 1990-1999: The Internet
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).
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8. The growth of browser usage, running on the HTML
language, 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,
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9. for international searching, depending on search engine
optimization (SEO) techniques. 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.
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10. 2020-Present: Lightweight Methodologies, Devops, Computing
Capability, Privacy and Security, and BigData
Trends in the earlier years from 2000 to 2020 focused on improving the
efficiency of development processes. Agile methods, model-driven
development, software product lines, Aspect programming, and experiment
trends were process and procedure improvements. These trends originated
within the disciplines of computer science, information technology, and
software engineering (i.e. the STEM hierarchy). In the following years, 2021 –
2023, these trends continue, but more efficient software development
approaches are called DevOps for Development and Operations. Also, during
these years, trends in other areas have significant impacts on software
engineering – on the types of problems addressed, on quality goals, especially
security and privacy; on processes and procedures, risks, and the scale of the
environment (that is, infrastructure, data, computing resources, user volume,
and diversity). To get a handle on all these trends, we look at the impact on the
models used in software engineering, which will indicate what changes might
come in the practice of software engineering
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11. Trends from 2000 – 2020 continued along with many new trends.
They are listed below, along with the software engineering models
they impact:
Impact on environment and computing process models:
•DEVOPS – the set of organizational practices and tools to improve
organizational capability to deliver more efficient applications and
services.
•Cloud Computing – over-the-network delivery to clients of
computing services and information technology resources from a
network of servers.
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12. •Quantum Computing – computing using a quantum computer based on quantum
physics; its unit of storage is the qubit. N – qubits can hold 2**n digital bits, which
get super big very quickly.
•Access and Authentication Tools – practices and tools to manage and control
access to organization digital resources and identification of authorized users
•Cyber-Security – technology to protect systems, networks, devices, and data from
attack
•Social Platforms – internet systems that enable virtual relationships and sharing of
all types of digital data among individuals, groups, businesses, organizations, and
communities, introducing a very large number of inter-connections and complex
web relationships
•Big Data – the amount of data that is too large to be practically processed by
traditional methods
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13. Impact on architecture models and database
models:
•Distributed and Decentralized Systems – a
system distributed over the internet without
centralized control software.
•Block Chain – a distributed, decentralized control
algorithm first used for bitcoin management; now
generalized, to refer to a distributed database of
lists of transactions stored on a peer-to-peer
network of servers.
•New Database Systems – NOSQL database
models for representing and processing
unstructured data, multiple data types, and large
amounts of data
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14. Impact on programming language models:
•New Languages – JavaScript and Java are popular
languages for mobile applications, Python for web
applications, data analysis, and data visualization. Newer
languages have features that emphasize support for web
programming, such as minimal code and no run-time
overhead, and are compatible with Java and JavaScript;
Kotlin is an example.
•Software Application Libraries – specialized
programming libraries, for example, for data analysis, data
visualization, business automation, verification and
validation, sound and image recognition and processing,
and machine learning. The above summary of current
trends and the models they impact indicates which
models are likely to be impacted, which, in turn, will
indicate which processes, procedures, and tools might
change.
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15. Current Trends in Software Engineering
Software engineering is a young discipline and is still developing. The
directions in which software engineering is developing include:
Aspects
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.
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16. Agile
Agile software development guides software development projects that
evolve rapidly with changing expectations and competitive markets.
Proponents of this method believe that heavy, document-driven processes
(like TickIT , CMM, and ISO 9000) are fading in importance. Some people
believe that companies and agencies export many of the jobs that can be
guided by heavy-weight processes. Related concepts include extreme
programming, scrum, and lean software development.
Experimental
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. Proponents
of this method advocate that the nature of software is such that we can
advance the knowledge of software through experiments only.
Model-driven
Model-driven design develops textual and graphical models as primary
design artifacts. Development tools are available that use model
transformation and code generation to generate well-organized code
fragments that serve as a basis for producing complete applications.
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17. Software product lines
Software product lines are 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.
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