Research toward an engineering discipline for software

Software engineering should aspire to be a true engineering discipline. We have made good progress in some areas, but a number of aspects of practical engineering are under-represented in our research portfolio. We have been slow to move beyond well-delimited systems developed by professional programmers to systems integrated from multiple public sources that evolve in the hands of their users. We have focused on formal reasoning and systematic testing to the detriment of qualitative and incremental reasoning supporting cost-effective, rather than perfect solutions. We have been slow to codify our results into unified theories and practical reference material. To establish a true engineering discipline for software, we need to broaden our view of what constitutes a “software system” and we need to develop techniques that help to provide cost-effective quality despite associated uncertainties.