Sat, 06 Jun 2009

Software Engineering ≠ Computer Science

Required reading for programmers...

Software engineering has an essential human component. Software maintainability, for example, is the ability of people to understand, find, and repair defects in a software system. The maintainability of software may be influenced by some formal notions of computer science -- perhaps the cyclomatic complexity of the software's control graph. But maintainability crucially involves humans, and their ability to grasp the meaning and intention of source code. The question of whether a particular software system is highly maintainable cannot be answered just by mechanically examining the software.

(link) [Dr. Dobb's Journal]

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