Development of software engineering: co-operative efforts from academia, government and industry

In the past 40 years, software engineering has emerged as an important sub-field of computer science. The quality and productivity of software have been improved and the cost and risk of software development been decreased due to the contributions made in this sub-field. The software engineering community needs to invest much more efforts to cope with the drastically increasing demands on the information technology as well as the extremely open and dynamic nature of the Internet. The history of software engineering is reviewed with emphasis on the driving forces of software and the milestones of software engineering development. The history of software engineering in China is reviewed with emphasis on the relationship between software engineering and the software industry. Based on the above reviews, we argue that software engineering should become an independent discipline along with computer science and co-operative efforts from academia, governments and industries should be needed for the harmonious development of software engineering. Some results are presented based on China's experience of developing software engineering under this model.