Software Engineering?
For decades now, the dominant metaphor for software development, at least in academia and in the trade literature, has been to treat it like an industrial engineering problem. Thus we call what we do “software engineering,” we attempt to define and compartmentalize its processes, we institute measurements and quality control cycles, and we treat the whole thing more or less like an assembly line.
It is a useful metaphor, to an extent. The problem is that the metaphor is so ingrained that we tend to forget that that’s all it is, that knowledge work is not industrial work and that coding is not manufacturing. We convince ourselves that what we do actually is industrial engineering and then we wail in desperation when we see that we’re not up to the standards of other engineering disciplines.
via PragPub, issue #7, January 2010.