Software Engineering

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6.2 
Evolution of software technologies
methodologies cannot be permitted to continually morph into new fads that avoid 
the reason for the chaotic state of the software development industry. Software 
development suffers for lack of attention to 
designing
 a product. Most method-
ologies properly accept that requirements are important and code generation is 
easy. However, there has been no significant contribution to instituting a rigorous 
and meticulous method of a establishing design for a complete software product. 
Programmatic design practices are at the coding level of the design hierarchy, 
and, therefore, completely insufficient for the establishment of a software product 
architecture.
The term 
architecture
 is used within this manuscript to distinguish it from what 
most engineering disciplines refer to as design. Software products represent a com-
posite of various subroutines that contribute to data processing transactions. There 
are no established design guidelines upon which to structurally arrange or organ-
ize these software routines. This is a fundamental challenge to the generation of 
new software products and is a consequence of software’s lack of physical proper-
ties. Systems engineering principles and practices provide the most relevant disci-
pline upon which to base software engineering competencies. Systems engineering 
provides a rigorous approach to establishing the architecture for a complex prod-
uct. Therefore, software engineering practices that are derived from systems engi-
neering must be promoted as the founding guidelines for a software engineering 
profession.