Chapter 32
The Road Ahead
CHAPTER OVERVIEW AND COMMENTS
The intent of this chapter is to provide a peek into the future of software engineering practice. Like any attempt at crystal ball gazing, my projections may be off the mark, but the general trends outlined in this final chapter of SEPA are likely to emerge as in the years ahead.
In addition to prognostication, this chapter presents a brief discussion of software engineering ethics. You may choose to cover this material very early in a software engineering course, although I think it’s best to wait until a student has substantial knowledge of just what software engineering is. In any event, this is a very important topic and should be covered, even if time is short.
32.1 The Importance of Software—Revisited
This section revisits the importance of computer software. The key aspect of this discussion is "software as differentiator." It is interesting to have your students come up with examples of software as a differentiator for products and services.
32.2 The Scope of Change
The technologies noted in the sidebar are worth discussing. You might also have your student visited Wired magazine’s on-line site (www.wired.com) for many interesting articles and projections about future technologies.
32.3 People and the Way They Build Systems
People and cultures change very slowly. In this section, I make the argument that ad evolving software engineering environment may have as much or more to do with people issues (in software engineering) than the people themselves. As tools, interaction mechanisms, and methodology mature, the culture for building software may change accordingly.
32.4 The New Software Engineering Process
The agile, incremental process model is discussed. If you did not emphasize Chapter 4, you might assign it now. Otherwise, focus on the milieu the “forces” many software teams to adopt this process model.
32.5 New Modes of Representing Information
Students spend much time thinking about data and program architectures, algorithms and the like. They spend very little time considering the intent of the data that is processed. This section considers the relationship between data, information, knowledge and wisdom.
You might relate some of this discussion to data mining in general and specific applications that span multiple data bases.
32.6 Technology as a Driver
Review the technology trends noted in the sidebar in this section.
32.7 The Software Engineering Responsibility
Software engineers should abide by a code of ethics that guides the work that they do and the products that they produce. The Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practices is well worth discussing with your students. To make the discussion more meaningful, you should pose specific business or personal situations and have your students indicate how they would react to them.
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