Software engineering (SE) is the profession of people who create and maintain software systems by applying technologies and practices from computer science, project management, engineering, application domains and other fields.
Software engineering deals with matters of cost and reliability, like traditional engineering disciplines. Some software applications contain millions of lines of code that are expected to perform properly in the face of changing conditions, making them comparable in complexity to the most complex modern machines. For example, a modern airliner has several million physical partsBoeing 747, By the Numbers "Six million: the number of parts, half of which are fasteners." (and the space shuttle about ten million parts p. 33: "A Boeing 747 roughly 3.5 million [parts... the apogee (and nightmare) of mechanical complexity is the space shuttle, with 10 million parts."), while the software for such an airliner can run to 4 million lines of code, "The 2.5 million lines of newly developed software were approximately six times more than any previous Boeing commercial airplane development program. Including commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) and optional software, the total size is more than 4 million lines of code.".
As of 2004, the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 760,840 software engineers holding jobs in the U.S.; for comparison, in the U.S. there are some 1.4 million practitioners employed in all other engineering disciplines combinedBureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, USDL 05-2145: Occupational Employment and Wages, November 2004, Table 1.. There are estimated to be about 1.5 million practitioners in the E.U., Asia, and elsewhere. SE pioneers include Barry Boehm, Fred Brooks, C. A. R. Hoare, and David Parnas. There is extensive debate about what SE is, who qualifies as a SE, who sets the standards, etc.
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