Software has become an indispensable part of most products and services. As
a result
the need to "engineer software" professionally with high quality at low cost
has
become important to all branches of industry. The supporting scientific
discipline
called "software engineering", on the other hand, has matured very slowly,
and has
only just now arrived at the verge of making a real contribution to truly
professionalizing the "engineering of software". This presentation reviews
the historic
evolution of both the profession of "engineering software" as well as the
scientific
discipline of "software engineering", points out their symbiotic
relationship, and
closes with an outlook into a visionary future full of challenges for
practitioners,
researchers and teachers.
CV:
H. Dieter Rombach received the B.S. degree (Vordiplom) in mathematics and the M.S.
degree (Diplom) in mathematics and computer science from the University of Karlsruhe,
Germany, and the Ph.D. degree (Dr.rer.nat.) in computer science from the University of
Kaiserslautern, Germany, in 1975, 1978 and 1984, respectively.
Dr. Rombach is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of
Kaiserslautern, and Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software
Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Previous affiliations included:
His research interests include software methodologies, process modeling, software reuse,
measurement of software processes and its products, and automated software
engineering environments. Dr. Rombach has received the NSF's Presidential Young
Investigator Award for his work in software engineering in 1990. He has published more
than 60 papers on software measurement and its application to maintenance and quality
assurance, software process modeling and software reuse. He has been involved in
several projects aimed at introducing measurement into industrial settings.
Dr. Rombach served as Guest Editor for the IEEE Software Magazine Special Issues on
Software Quality Assurance (September 19979 and Measurement-based Software
Process Improvement (July 1994). His professional activities include serving on the
editorial boards of IEEE Software Magazine, Journal of Systems and Software,
International Journal of Empirical Software Engineering and International Journal of
Software Process and serving on technology advisory boards for state and federal
government in Germany. Currently he serves as general chair of the 18th International
Software Engineering Conference in Berlin, Germany, March 1996. He is a member of the
IEEE Computer Society, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the German
Computer Society (GI).