Taking Back "Software Engineering" – Craftsmanship is Insufficient
summary
Argues for reclaiming "software engineering" as an empirical, experiment-driven craft that emphasizes iterative development, feedback loops and incremental design. Cites Margaret Hamilton’s fail‑safe that produced the 1201/1202 alarms and saved Apollo 11, the Ranger program’s iterative failures‑to‑success experiments, eBay’s quality gains after dramatically reducing release batch size, and DevOps survey correlations showing higher productivity and quality when continuous delivery practices are used. Claims engineering means measuring, testing hypotheses and learning fast rather than heavyweight upfront design.
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chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:07What "Software Engineering" is not
- 4:57The impact of "Engineering" in software
- 6:09All engineering is not the same
- 9:13What is "Engineering"?
- 10:37Fundamentals of "Engineering" approach
- 11:15Iterative
- 13:22Feedback
- 15:14Incremental
- 21:57Iterative vs Incremental
- 22:38Experimental
- 25:36Margaret Hamilton: The first "Software Engineer"
- 27:39Experimental (continued)
- 33:19Empirical
- 37:03Continuous Delivery as an engineering discipline
- 38:39Outro
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