From the Editor - Roundtable: Who Needs Software Engineering?

T he traditional distinction between software and hardware was that software was easily changeable and therefore " soft, " whereas hardware was captured on a physical medium like a chip, was hard to change, and was therefore " hard. " This traditional distinction is breaking down today. Software delivered via the In-ternet is clearly " soft " in the traditional sense, but software delivered via CD or DVD is hardly " soft " in the sense of being " easy to change. " We now commonly see software being delivered on EPROMs; the electronic control module that controls my car's fuel injection is an example. I can take my car to my dealer to have the chip reprogrammed , so in some sense the program on the chip is soft, but is it software? Should the chip developers be using software engineering? Computer chip designers are now doing much of their chip development using software engineering like tools. Only at the last minute is the code committed to silicon. Do we really think that committing code to a CD-ROM makes it software but committing it to a silicon wafer makes it hardware? Have we arrived at a point where even computer hardware is really software? If software and hardware are totally different , then electrical engineers designing computer chips don't need to know about software engineering. But if modern chip design involves a significant amount of programming , then perhaps electrical engineers should know something about software engineering. Should computer hardware be designed using software engineering? Throw a few other disciplines into the mix such as Web programming and games development, and I think a fundamental question lurks here: What is software? This question is important because it leads to a second question: What is software engineering today, and who needs it? I recently posed these questions to several IEEE Software board members. Blurred distinctions Wolfgang Strigel: No doubt, the distinction between software and hardware has blurred. When the term software was coined, there was a clearer distinction, or nobody cared because it sounded good and made intuitive sense. Moreover, it is not important that software is modifiable (or " soft " once it is completed). Software does not change its nature by being turned into something " hard " or unmodifiable. After all, we have accepted the concept of selling software on CDs. And RAM can also be write-protected. …