Progress toward an Engineering Discipline of Software

Is "software engineering" really engineering? The term was coined in 1968 to call attention to problems with software production. Both theory and practice for software have evolved since then, but do we yet have a true engineering discipline? This keynote sketches the evolution of software engineering, drawing on civil engineering and software architecture for examples that show the progressive codification of informal knowledge toward rigorous models and tools. This provides the basis for assessing the maturity of the field and identifying our next challenges.