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Software Development versus Software Engineering? (1 Viewer)

MrBrightside

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It's the same tbh.
Software engineering (SE) is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software.[1] [2] [3] The term software engineering first appeared in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference, and was meant to provoke thought regarding the perceived "software crisis" at the time.[4][5]

Software development, a much used and more generic term, does not necessarily subsume the engineering paradigm. The field's future looks bright according to Money Magazine and Salary.com, which rated Software Engineer as the best job in the United States in 2006.[6] In 2012, software engineering was again ranked as the best job in the United States, this time by CareerCast.com.[7]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
 

Demise

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Software engineering (SE) is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the design, development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software.[1] [2] [3] The term software engineering first appeared in the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference, and was meant to provoke thought regarding the perceived "software crisis" at the time.[4][5]

Software development, a much used and more generic term, does not necessarily subsume the engineering paradigm. The field's future looks bright according to Money Magazine and Salary.com, which rated Software Engineer as the best job in the United States in 2006.[6] In 2012, software engineering was again ranked as the best job in the United States, this time by CareerCast.com.[7]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering
Are we talking about university courses or just in general? Software dev and engineering is nearly-identical in the workforce, you're writing software, designing the code, all the functions and operations, etc. The courses in university are also similar, but differ depending where you go. Engineering has strict focus on physics which makes me wonder what that has to do with software.
 

ahdil33

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To my knowledge from the people I've asked, I know there's a massive difference between software engineering and computer science. Software Engo encompasses the whole development cycle, from talking to the client and getting feedback, to testing, maintence etc, including all the programming during the middle. Comp Science is more focused on the programming side. I assume software development refers to just developing the software, not necessarily the whole cycle like software engo.

And I'm talking about the uni courses here. Software Engo has to take a lot of extra units regarding management and what not which the computer science student doesnt' take.
 

Demise

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To my knowledge from the people I've asked, I know there's a massive difference between software engineering and computer science. Software Engo encompasses the whole development cycle, from talking to the client and getting feedback, to testing, maintence etc, including all the programming during the middle. Comp Science is more focused on the programming side. I assume software development refers to just developing the software, not necessarily the whole cycle like software engo.

And I'm talking about the uni courses here. Software Engo has to take a lot of extra units regarding management and what not which the computer science student doesnt' take.
Software engineering is right, but comp sci is focused on systems, not only programming - programming is at the core of all computing subjects, but it's not the majority.
 

Lolsmith

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Are we talking about university courses or just in general? Software dev and engineering is nearly-identical in the workforce, you're writing software, designing the code, all the functions and operations, etc. The courses in university are also similar, but differ depending where you go. Engineering has strict focus on physics which makes me wonder what that has to do with software.
First up, software development is a part of software engineering (seng). Seng is bigger than that and deals with a hell of a lot more than just straight up coding. A significant part of being an engineer is knowing how to satisfy a customer/client's desires. This can include, for seng, non-software solutions.

UNSW SENG students don't do physics. I don't think you've done enough research on this.
 

Demise

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First up, software development is a part of software engineering (seng). Seng is bigger than that and deals with a hell of a lot more than just straight up coding. A significant part of being an engineer is knowing how to satisfy a customer/client's desires. This can include, for seng, non-software solutions.

UNSW SENG students don't do physics. I don't think you've done enough research on this.
Hence why I asked, are we talking about university courses or just in general?

Software dev and engineering is nearly-identical in the workforce, you're writing software, designing the code, all the functions and operations, etc.
Uni-wise, SENG is larger than software development, but in general when you're talking to a friend/consumer and they ask you to make a software product for them, you'd run by the same course of action if you were a software dev/engineer. I agreed with the OP, in the workforce you can use developing software and engineering software interchangeably, since you will not just develop a software which no one likes and not satisfy the consumer (duh).

I never said UNSW SENG, so I'm not going to do research on something I never said, also, I was speaking to an engineer at Macq who said they do study physics topics underneath software engineering, so clearly it differs for all universities. I request that next time you try to reply to my post, be sure you read what I said.
 

MrBrightside

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Hence why I asked, are we talking about university courses or just in general?



Uni-wise, SENG is larger than software development, but in general when you're talking to a friend/consumer and they ask you to make a software product for them, you'd run by the same course of action if you were a software dev/engineer. I agreed with the OP, in the workforce you can use developing software and engineering software interchangeably, since you will not just develop a software which no one likes and not satisfy the consumer (duh).

I never said UNSW SENG, so I'm not going to do research on something I never said, also, I was speaking to an engineer at Macq who said they do study physics topics underneath software engineering, so clearly it differs for all universities. I request that next time you try to reply to my post, be sure you read what I said.
I'm currently in the workforce, coding in PHP with HTML to read from a database using MySQL AND manually comparing doing tonnes of spread sheets 90% of my time.

I'm studying a Bachelor of Information Technology, which requires no maths, a lot of emphasis on BUSINESS information systems, diagram modelling of pen/paper systems as well as computerised systems, a bit of Java, HTML/CSS coding (first year, second year is C# and more advanced Java - but I'm going to elective in Programming on the internet which teaches more about PHP, MySQL, AJAX, JavaScript, XML, etc), a bit of UNIX scripting.

If I could change course, I don't know if I would. Since either way, maths is not really required for the IT industry unless you end up at Google (good luck making it in) or some other specialised engineering firm, in a role that's not IT support/admin related. Coding roles do not require much, if any maths at all, but it would vary depending on what your company needs. Obviously a game developer company will require 3D graphic maths for its polygons and stuff, but a lot of that is managed by IDEs these days any ways.

There is no definite line in the sand drawn for this (as industry tends to misuse the job titles a lot and interchangeably) however, I like to think of it like this:

Software Engineers AND Computer Scientists create the bare bones/structures such as (IDE's, memory referencing to the hardware, relating programming constructs and commands to the CPU and memory at a kernel level.) to provide a clean and elegant interface for developers to easily develop on. These people are at the forefront of where software meets hardware as far as technology goes.

Software Developers are sort of like the middle man, they are the people who put all these coding combinations, e.g. variable assignments, if, switch, loops statements to (designed and set by Software Engineers) make your applications, the nice beautiful layouts you see as an end user, whether it's on a mobile, desktop or on the web. It's kinda like putting scattered lego bricks together, so many different kind of bricks at your disposal, all they have to do is find the correct bricks, and when every brick connects appropriately, you have a working product.

Then you have your other miscellaneous business IT jobs { IT Support, System Admins, Account Admins, Network Engineers, Business Analysts }, which are the people who USE the Applications developed by Software Developers with the aid of Software Engineer's providing low level technical details of the programming languages constructs and syntax, tools (IDEs), compilers, frameworks. Occasionally these IT guys will write a quick script in UNIX, or tweak some PHP.

Put it basically:

Soft Engs Create
Soft Devs use Soft Engs tools to develop
IT Pros, USE/ apply these tools to solve problems, speed up old processes - without the need to know too many technical details, most tools are served on a silver platter from the developers and engineers, and just have to be manually executed. E.g. using MS Word or Google Docs to facilitate a business meeting.

I didn't go into too much detail of the other miscellaneous business IT jobs because that's out of the scope of this thread's topic.

Helpful site: http://www.onlinecomputersciencedegree.com/

Computing is an area that is always changing, and so are businesses. For the next few years there may be a huge influx for computing jobs in Australia. Then for the next 5 years after that, it may tend to be outsourced due to cheaper labour, or for call centres which no one wants to do any ways. And then when businesses find they are not getting the results they wanted, they may decide to insource again. It's a risky playing field. here are some useful sites for this:

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/it-salaries-to-rise-20111006-1lagx.html

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/more-companies-likely-to-reverse-it-outsourcing-20120924-26h6s.html
 
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Lolsmith

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Hence why I asked, are we talking about university courses or just in general?
Both, really.


Uni-wise, SENG is larger than software development, but in general when you're talking to a friend/consumer and they ask you to make a software product for them, you'd run by the same course of action if you were a software dev/engineer. I agreed with the OP, in the workforce you can use developing software and engineering software interchangeably, since you will not just develop a software which no one likes and not satisfy the consumer (duh).

I never said UNSW SENG, so I'm not going to do research on something I never said, also, I was speaking to an engineer at Macq who said they do study physics topics underneath software engineering, so clearly it differs for all universities. I request that next time you try to reply to my post, be sure you read what I said.
Yep fair call on the second part, I presumed you cared about that specifically because you're a UNSW hopeful. (I don't think comp sci students do physics either, but I haven't checked)

To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea a "software development" degree existed. Yeah those terms are fine to use interchangeably in that context, but not for the respective roles. Engineers will generally do a lot more than designers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a designer can't fill an engineer's role, if you follow what I'm saying.

As per the OP, yeah they're probably used interchangeably in job ads and what not, albeit erroneously.
 

MrBrightside

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Both, really.



Yep fair call on the second part, I presumed you cared about that specifically because you're a UNSW hopeful. (I don't think comp sci students do physics either, but I haven't checked)

To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea a "software development" degree existed. Yeah those terms are fine to use interchangeably in that context, but not for the respective roles. Engineers will generally do a lot more than designers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a designer can't fill an engineer's role, if you follow what I'm saying.

As per the OP, yeah they're probably used interchangeably in job ads and what not, albeit erroneously.

Comp sci has no compulsory physics, neither does SENG at UNSW. USyd SENG has the only compulsory physics I know of for a computing course.
 

Demise

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Both, really.



Yep fair call on the second part, I presumed you cared about that specifically because you're a UNSW hopeful. (I don't think comp sci students do physics either, but I haven't checked)

To be perfectly honest with you, I had no idea a "software development" degree existed. Yeah those terms are fine to use interchangeably in that context, but not for the respective roles. Engineers will generally do a lot more than designers, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a designer can't fill an engineer's role, if you follow what I'm saying.

As per the OP, yeah they're probably used interchangeably in job ads and what not, albeit erroneously.
Glad we could agree, and I was extremely tempted to do software engineering at UNSW but chose CompSci as my first preference since it's flexibility and customisation with the open units and the ability to major in Database Systems or AI.
 

Demise

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I'm currently in the workforce, coding in PHP with HTML to read from a database using MySQL AND manually comparing doing tonnes of spread sheets 90% of my time.

I'm studying a Bachelor of Information Technology, which requires no maths, a lot of emphasis on BUSINESS information systems, diagram modelling of pen/paper systems as well as computerised systems, a bit of Java, HTML/CSS coding (first year, second year is C# and more advanced Java - but I'm going to elective in Programming on the internet which teaches more about PHP, MySQL, AJAX, JavaScript, XML, etc), a bit of UNIX scripting.

If I could change course, I don't know if I would. Since either way, maths is not really required for the IT industry unless you end up at Google (good luck making it in) or some other specialised engineering firm, in a role that's not IT support/admin related. Coding roles do not require much, if any maths at all, but it would vary depending on what your company needs. Obviously a game developer company will require 3D graphic maths for its polygons and stuff, but a lot of that is managed by IDEs these days any ways.

There is no definite line in the sand drawn for this (as industry tends to misuse the job titles a lot and interchangeably) however, I like to think of it like this:

Software Engineers AND Computer Scientists create the bare bones/structures such as (IDE's, memory referencing to the hardware, relating programming constructs and commands to the CPU and memory at a kernel level.) to provide a clean and elegant interface for developers to easily develop on. These people are at the forefront of where software meets hardware as far as technology goes.

Software Developers are sort of like the middle man, they are the people who put all these coding combinations, e.g. variable assignments, if, switch, loops statements to (designed and set by Software Engineers) make your applications, the nice beautiful layouts you see as an end user, whether it's on a mobile, desktop or on the web. It's kinda like putting scattered lego bricks together, so many different kind of bricks at your disposal, all they have to do is find the correct bricks, and when every brick connects appropriately, you have a working product.

Then you have your other miscellaneous business IT jobs { IT Support, System Admins, Account Admins, Network Engineers, Business Analysts }, which are the people who USE the Applications developed by Software Developers with the aid of Software Engineer's providing low level technical details of the programming languages constructs and syntax, tools (IDEs), compilers, frameworks. Occasionally these IT guys will write a quick script in UNIX, or tweak some PHP.

Put it basically:

Soft Engs Create
Soft Devs use Soft Engs tools to develop
IT Pros, USE/ apply these tools to solve problems, speed up old processes - without the need to know too many technical details, most tools are served on a silver platter from the developers and engineers, and just have to be manually executed. E.g. using MS Word or Google Docs to facilitate a business meeting.

I didn't go into too much detail of the other miscellaneous business IT jobs because that's out of the scope of this thread's topic.

Helpful site: http://www.onlinecomputersciencedegree.com/

Computing is an area that is always changing, and so are businesses. For the next few years there may be a huge influx for computing jobs in Australia. Then for the next 5 years after that, it may tend to be outsourced due to cheaper labour, or for call centres which no one wants to do any ways. And then when businesses find they are not getting the results they wanted, they may decide to insource again. It's a risky playing field. here are some useful sites for this:

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/it-salaries-to-rise-20111006-1lagx.html

http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/more-companies-likely-to-reverse-it-outsourcing-20120924-26h6s.html
When did you finish your HSC?
 

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