originally posted on one of my several now defunct blogs, called On Engineering on 17th August 2012
When trawling the net and various books online for background to my post wondering whether Software Engineering is Engineering, I came across a book on how to teach software engineering (its name, like this clause, would only interrupt the flow of this post). I was only afforded the preview on Google Play (OK, I didn’t buy the book), but one phrase I came across intrigued me, since it gets to the core of my thoughts on this blog. The phrase is this:
“Software engineering - the “engineering” of software - is part process, part technology, part resource management, and, debatably, until recently, part luck …. Learning to be a software engineer - learning about software - learning about engineering (the former, a nebulous topic, the latter an equally nebulous attitude of professionalism) form the target that educators are aiming to hit…”
Or, paraphrased: “Engineering is a nebulous attitude of professionalism.”
I think that’s a fabulous non-description, but it raises some interesting considerations, as that word nebulous - cloudy, vague, formless - bears so much information and insinuation. The word implies that engineering can be observed and classified but only billows around a probing grasp. It implies that the macro and the micro definitions of engineering are completely different: in the same way that clouds are made up of a myriad of droplets and the nucleae of those droplets, engineering is made up of myriad interconnections and dependencies. It’s what makes engineering so potentially fascinating and so potentially frustrating.
Instead of trying to capture all of those influences in words, I decided to resort to the prototypical engineering fallback tool - a sketch. It’s more of a brainstorm than anything defined, though: it’s nebulous, made up of lots of droplets and is liable to change at any moment. Here’s what it looks like today:
I’ll keep refining it, but you get the picture. The form of your own particular cloud depends entirely on your engineering environment and whichever way the winds of development and commerce blow. Is engineering unique in this respect? Undoubtedly not - there are many more nebulous attitudes of professionalism - but it’s a good thought-raiser.
And there’s one thing that the nebulous analogy misses entirely: clouds don’t produce paperwork.
You may use the picture for your own devices under a kind of CC license: Common Courtesy. A simple link and acknowledgement would be appreciated!
