There are basically two types of people who are creating software: Hackers and Software Engineers. While hackers are eager to create something new diving into the system and push the borders, Software Engineers are of the more conservative type carefully laying out a plan for whatever it is they want to create. My favourite definition of what Software Engineering is reads as follows: “The application of a disciplined and systematical approach for developing, operating and maintaining software.”. And that’s exactly what sets the software engineer apart from the hacker.

The term Software Engineering was coined  at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference of 1968 in Garmisch, Germany. Due to a time of projects increasingly running over-budget, running over-time and even completely failing a solution had to be found for what was called the “software crisis”.

This software crisis was mainly possible due to the lack of standards, good techniques (such as Object-oriented encapsulation, structured programming), best practices such as design patterns. Even tools that are thought of being very common such as IDEs, bug tracking systems or version control systems were absent at that time.

The NATO discussed “The Software Crisis” in 1967 were Prof Dr Friedrich L Bauer suggested the term “Software Engineering” as a way to conceive of both the problem and the solution, basically marking the beginning of Software Engineering. Since Software Engineering has been established, the amount of failed projects has decreased massively where it is applied correctly.