History of software engineering

[8] Margaret H. Hamilton is the person who came up with the idea of naming the discipline, software engineering, as a way of giving it legitimacy during the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer.

[citation needed] Seemingly, every new technology and practice from the 1970s through the 1990s was trumpeted as a silver bullet to solve the software crisis.

Tools, discipline, formal methods, process, and professionalism were touted as silver bullets:[citation needed] In 1986, Fred Brooks published his No Silver Bullet article, arguing that no individual technology or practice would ever make a 10-fold improvement in productivity within 10 years.

Advocates for Ada, components, and processes continued arguing for years that their favorite technology would be a silver bullet.

Others interpret no silver bullet as proof that software engineering has finally matured and recognized that projects succeed due to hard work.

[citation needed] However, it could also be said that there are, in fact, a range of silver bullets today, including lightweight methodologies (see "Project management"), spreadsheet calculators, customized browsers, in-site search engines, database report generators, integrated design-test coding-editors with memory/differences/undo, and specialty shops that generate niche software, such as information web sites, at a fraction of the cost of totally customized web site development.

[citation needed] The rise of the Internet led to very rapid growth in the demand for international information display/e-mail systems on the World Wide Web.

[citation needed] The growth of browser usage, running on the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), changed the way in which information-display and retrieval was organized.

The widespread network connections led to the growth and prevention of international computer viruses on MS Windows computers, and the vast proliferation of spam e-mail became a major design issue in e-mail systems, flooding communication channels and requiring semi-automated pre-screening.

Very large software systems still used heavily documented methodologies, with many volumes in the documentation set; however, smaller systems had a simpler, faster alternative approach to managing the development and maintenance of software calculations and algorithms, information storage/retrieval and display.

This method emphasizes extensive, systematic, formal code reuse, to try to industrialize the software development process.

The Future of Software Engineering conference (FOSE), held at ICSE 2000, documented the state of the art of SE in 2000 and listed many problems to be solved over the next decade.

[citation needed] In 2006, Money Magazine and Salary.com rated software engineering as the best job in America in terms of growth, pay, stress levels, flexibility in hours and working environment, creativity, and how easy it is to enter and advance in the field.

[22] Recent advances in deep artificial neural networks and distributed computing have led to a proliferation of software libraries, including Deeplearning4j, TensorFlow, Theano and Torch.