The Push to Make Software Engineering Respectable

Software engineering (SE) is maturing as a discipline and profession, but three decades after the first NATO Conference on Software Engineering, it is still not regarded by some to be a legitimate, respectable engineering profession. In 1995, Gary Ford and Norman Gibbs of the Software Engineering Institute evaluated what it means for a profession to be mature and how SE was doing. Their study found that, relative to other fields and engineering branches, most elements that make SE a profession were quite immature. Five years later, SE has had countless practitioners (a.k.a. software developers), thousands of published articles, dozens of conferences and workshops, and a respectable number of education and training programs. But despite all this progress, SE, while recognizable, is still immature-- as evidenced by the significant gap among vision, education, and standard practice. The reasons are legion, but they boil down to one simple fact: The field is still young. The authors present their assessment of SE immaturity in this article. Although they believe time will eventually mature SE, a calculated push can accelerate the maturation process. By "push," they mean defining, accrediting, and evaluating new curricula that stress CS and SE fundamentals.