Software Engineering Principles: Do They Meet Engineering Criteria?
Kenza Meridji, Alain Abran · Journal of Software Engineering and Applications · 2010
As a discipline, software engineering is not as mature as other engineering disciplines, and it still lacks consensus on a well-recognized set of fundamental principles. A 2006 analysis surveyed and analyzed 308 separate proposals for principles of software engineering, of which only thirty-four met the criteria to be recognized as such. This paper reports on a further analysis of these thirty-four candidate principles using two sets of engineering criteria derived from: A) the engineering categories of knowledge defined by Vincenti in his analysis of engineering foundations; and B) the joint IEEE and ACM software engineering curriculum. The outcome of this analysis is a proposed set of nine software engineering principles that conform to engineering criteria.