Editing Software engineering (section)

== Criticism ==

Some call for licensing, certification and codified bodies of knowledge as mechanisms for spreading the engineering knowledge and maturing the field.<ref>{{cite journal
|title=Viewpoint: taking the lead in licensing software engineers
|author=Donald J. Bagert
|journal=[[Communications of the ACM]]
|date= April 1999
|volume=42
|issue=4
|pages=27–29
|doi=10.1145/299157.299163}}
{{open access}}</ref>

Some claim that the concept of software engineering is so new that it is rarely understood, and it is widely misinterpreted, including in software engineering textbooks, papers, and among the communities of programmers and crafters.<ref name=Boehm>{{cite journal
|author=[[Barry Boehm]]
|title=Software engineering is a value-based contact sport
|journal=[[IEEE Software]]
|volume=19
|number=5
|pages=95–96
|date=September–October 2002
|doi=10.1109/MS.2002.1032863}}</ref>

Some claim that a core issue with software engineering is that its approaches are not empirical enough because a real-world validation of approaches is usually absent, or very limited and hence software engineering is often misinterpreted as feasible only in a "theoretical environment."<ref name=Boehm/>

[[Edsger Dijkstra]], a founder of many of the concepts in software development today, rejected the idea of "software engineering" up until his death in 2002, arguing that those terms were poor analogies for what he called the "radical novelty" of [[computer science]]:

{{quotation |
A number of these phenomena have been bundled under the name "Software Engineering". As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory. Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."<ref>{{cite web | url=http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html| title=On the cruelty of really teaching computing science| last = Dijkstra| first = E. W.| author-link = Edsger Dijkstra| year=1988 | access-date=2014-01-10}}</ref>}}