Software Engineering Body of Knowledge
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) is a product of the Software Engineering Coordinating Committee. The IEEE Computer Society is also involved.
The software engineering body of knowledge is an all-inclusive term that describes the sum of knowledge within the profession of software engineering. Since it is usually not possible to put the full body of knowledge of even an emerging discipline, such as software engineering, into a single document, there is a need for a Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. This Guide will seek to identify and describe that subset of the body of knowledge that is generally accepted, even though software engineers must be knowledgeable not only in software engineering, but also, of course, in other related disciplines. [1]
Contents |
[edit] Contents of the SWEBOK
As of the 2004 edition, the SWEBOK guide define ten knowledge areas (KAs) within the field of software engineering
- Software Requirements (Requirements analysis)
- Software design
- Software Construction (Computer programming)
- Software testing
- Software maintenance
- Software configuration management
- Software Engineering management
- Software Engineering Process (Software development process)
- Software Engineering Tools And Methods
- Software quality
The SWEBOK also defines disciplines related to the software engineering
- Computer engineering
- Computer science
- Management
- Mathematics
- Quality management
- Software Ergonomics (Cognitive ergonomics)
- Systems engineering
[edit] Criticism and alternatives
Cem Kaner and Grady Booch are two of many who have publicly stated that the document is misguided, and the Association for Computing Machinery has withdrawn from its initial participation in the project. Many claim that the document may not accurately reflect the community's view of software engineering, but more fundamentally, its primary goal is to enable the licensing of programmers — a goal which ignores the continuing (and unsolved) discussion as to whether programming is really analogous to other engineering fields.
German scientists already criticised, that the SWEBOK only regards sources which were published in English, and is therefore just an "anglophone" guide to the SWEBOK, as it excludes ideas and concepts from sources in other (scientific) world languages like French, German or Spanish. The SWEBOK2004 itself states in its introduction: "Important and highly relevant reference material written in languages other than English have been omitted from the selected reference material." (SWEBOK2004, Limitations, page xix).
Another effort to define a body of knowledge for software engineering is the "Computing Curriculum Software Engineering (CCSE)", meanwhile officially named Software Engineering 2004 (SE2004). The difference is that whereas SWEBOK defines the software engineering knowledge that practitioners should have after four years of practice, SE2004 defines the knowledge that an undergraduate software engineering student should possess upon graduation (including knowledge of mathematics, general engineering principles, and other related areas).
[edit] External links
- swebok.org - official site.
