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Record W2049483354 · doi:10.1145/340855.341144

A whole new kind of engineering

2000· article· en· W2049483354 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2000
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersMcMaster University
KeywordsSoftware Engineering Process GroupSocial software engineeringSoftware walkthroughSoftware engineeringCivil engineering softwareSoftware developmentSoftware requirementsEngineeringPersonal software processSoftwareSoftware constructionEngineering managementComputer science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

There is a lot of momentum for software engineering to become a title act branch of engineering. A brochure from McMaster University (www.cas.mcmaster.ca/cas/undergraduate/SEbrochure.pdf, Fall 1999), reads, "At McMaster we have taken the position that software engineering is a branch of engineering and have applied well established principles of engineering education in this new specialty." And, the Texas Board of Professional Engineers is certifying software engineers as title act engineers, today. If other states follow then software engineering will become a title act branch of engineering by fiat.While I agree that software engineering resembles traditional engineering in many ways, I also believe that software engineering is a whole new kind of engineering that is equal to, parallel to, and independent of traditional engineering. I believe that if software engineers want to be licensed, they should recognize their unique reality and become licensed in a way that reflects this reality. Software engineers should be professionalized on their own terms, with their own regulatory structure. Software engineers should create a whole new kind of engineering, and not just follow the path trodden by traditional engineers.In the first section, I argue that software engineering is a real profession that stands on its own and that its culture differs substantially from that of traditional engineering. Software engineering is big: it counts nearly as many practitioners as traditional engineering; diverse: it has many areas of specialized practice; and enduring: it has grown steadily for more than fifty years. Every facet of software engineering, from technology to attitude to origins, differs from traditional engineering, which profoundly affects the culture of software engineering. Software engineering is not a branch of traditional engineering.In the second section, I argue that all-of-software-engineering-combined should resemble all-of-traditional-engineering-combined. Four kinds of traditional engineering regulation are practiced today that software engineering can emulate: unregulated, title-act, practice-act, and all-of-engineering-combined. Of these four kinds, title-act and all-of-engineering-combined are the most likely outcomes. There is a lot of momentum to regulate software engineering as a title-act branch of engineering. However, regulating software engineering like all-of-engineering-combined will give software engineers more control over their destiny, let them define their own identity and culture, wield their own power, and set their own curriculum and immigration policy.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.029
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.610
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.029
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.014
GPT teacher head0.231
Teacher spread0.217 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it