Is software engineering dead?

Software Engineering: Dead? by Jeff Atwood, asks this question.  My question is this: Did anyone find that their software engineering courses in school mapped to what you actually do at work?  Doubtful in my opinion, unless you attended certain schools.

My series of articles that I am doing about engineering games is not about software engineering, which I consider to be important in many ways and certainly not dead, but definitely boring to creative people like Jeff Atwood.  The process outlined in the ITIL courses or on SEI are frankly mind numbing in nature to a person who really gets how to build and maintain code, for example, Clint Rutkas, a teammate of mine at Microsoft.  Clint gets it.

What about all of the other people in the world?  Not everyone is a Kenny Spade (another teammate), or a Clint Rutkas, and they will need proof that is understandable. 

Software provides services, and unless you want to have to be coding, maintenance or project reviews every minute of your waking life, then you need to figure out a way to do code releases, code reviews, reporting, project management and so forth.  Without the concepts of software engineering, how do you get your payouts in a contract?  How do you prove to a non-software knowledgeable auditor, manager, end user that you have completed what you said you would?

It isn’t like you put up a bunch of drywall that you can point to and say: “The drywall has been installed, taped, sanded and is ready to be primed, sign here, and give me the check.”

If you borrowed money from CIT for instances, and they just went out of business (likely by the way), how do you prove to the new investors that you will have product to pay off the loan at a certain time?  Whoever gets the assets of CIT will likely want their loan paid off in full, unless you can prove that you are on schedule.

With games, you have to be able to show managers, teammates and so forth that you are getting your work done.  Other people, who are not software savvy need to see progress in a manner that is understandable to them.  Those are the components of “software engineering”.

However, the boring approach that most people take with software engineering would dull anyone’s intellect. Using tools like Visual Studio 2010 Team Studio with TFS is a great way to end the boredom of software engineering.

As we move through my discussions about the art of software creation, architecture and management, I hope to show that software development requires many types of people, artistic, detailed oriented, creative science, and management working together.