We need software engineering because we create large and complex software systems. The discipline emerged in the 1960s because the first attempts to build large software systems mostly went wrong. Creating software was much more expensive than expected, took longer than planned, and the software itself was often unreliable. To address these problems, we have developed a range of software engineering techniques and technologies, which have been remarkably successful. We can now build systems that are much larger, more complex, much more reliable, and more effective than the software systems of the 1970s.
However, we have not “solved” the problems of large system engineering. Software project failures are still common. For example, there have ...
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