Easy essay on Software engineering
Answers
SE applications are used in a wide range of activities, from industry to entertainment. Software applications improve user productivity and quality of life. Application software examples: office suites, video games, and the world wide web. System software examples: embedded systems and operating systems.
SE technologies and practices improve the productivity of developers and the quality of the applications they create. Software engineering examples: databases, languages, libraries, patterns, and tools. Computer
Answer:
When the first digital computers appeared in the early 1940s, the instructions to make them operate were wired into the machine. Practitioners quickly realized that this design was not flexible and came up with the "stored program architecture" or von Neumann architecture. Thus the division between "hardware" and "software" began with abstraction being used to deal with the complexity of computing.
Programming languages started to appear in the early 1950 and this was also another major step in abstraction. Major languages such as Fortran, ALGOL, PL/I, and COBOL were released in the late 1950 and 1960s to deal with scientific, algorithmic, and business problems respectively. David Parnas introduced the key concept of modularity and information hiding in 1972 to help programmers deal with the ever-increasing complexity of software systems.
The origins of the term "software engineering" have been attributed to various sources. The term "software engineering" appeared in a list of services offered by companies in the June 1965 issue of COMPUTERS and AUTOMATION and was used more formally in the August 1966 issue of Communications of the ACM (Volume 9, number 8) “letter to the ACM membership” by the ACM President Anthony A. Oettinger;, it is also associated with the title of a NATO conference in 1968 by Professor Friedrich L. Bauer, the first conference on software engineering. Independently, Margaret Hamilton named the discipline "software engineering" during the Apollo missions to give what they were doing legitimacy. At the time there was perceived to be a "software crisis". The 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018) celebrates 50 years of "Software Engineering" with the Plenary Sessions' keynotes of Frederick Brooks and Margaret Hamilton.
