software engineering

Meanings

1. The subfield of engineering concerned with applying a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.

Etymology

First attested in 1965 in service listings (in “systems software engineering”), partly popularized by American computer scientists Anthony Oettinger and Margaret Hamilton later in the decade. In a 1966 letter to the members of the Association for Computing Machinery, listed by the Oxford English Dictionary as the term’s first attestation, Oettinger wrote, “We must recognize ourselves […] as members of an engineering profession, be it hardware engineering or software engineering […]”.