History of Software Engineering - Overview

Overview

There are a number of areas where the evolution of software engineering is notable:

• Emergence as a profession: By the early 1980s, software engineering had already emerged as a bona fide profession, to stand beside computer science and traditional engineering. See also software engineering professionalism.
• Role of women: In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, men often filled the more prestigious and better paying hardware engineering roles, but often delegated the writing of software to women. Grace Hopper, Jamie Fenton and many other unsung women filled many programming jobs during the first several decades of software engineering. Today, fewer women work in software engineering than in other professions, a situation whose cause is not clearly identified. It is often attributed to sexual discrimination, cyberculture or bias in education. Many academic and professional organizations consider this situation unbalanced and are trying hard to solve it.
• Processes: Processes have become a big part of software engineering and are hailed for their potential to improve software and sharply criticized for their potential to constrict programmers.
• Cost of hardware: The relative cost of software versus hardware has changed substantially over the last 50 years. When mainframes were expensive and required large support staffs, the few organizations buying them also had the resources to fund large, expensive custom software engineering projects. Computers are now much more numerous and much more powerful, which has several effects on software. The larger market can support large projects to create commercial off the shelf software, as done by companies such as Microsoft. The cheap machines allow each programmer to have a terminal capable of fairly rapid compilation. The programs in question can use techniques such as garbage collection, which make them easier and faster for the programmer to write. On the other hand, many fewer organizations are interested in employing programmers for large custom software projects, instead using commercial off the shelf software as much as possible.