Software Engineering is a term that I always asked myself: “what exactly does that mean?”. A Software Engineer most likely writes code but I would wonder what else do they do. Reflecting on my recent studies, I now have a better idea to what else is involved in Software Engineering. It is not a simple answer to my own question but I will be breaking down a few topics I have learned and hope to learn even more about.
The first main topic in Software Engineering that I found interest in is the “Agile Project Management”. Project Management is a very important concept in terms of building with code, or actually with anything. Learning that there are different ways to approach Project Management immediately helped me apply what I learned to better understand my job at the company I currently work for. I currently work as Business Analyst and on a recent project at work I realized we were working in an Agile environment and the process going on made much more sense to me. This way of Project Management is as team collaborative, to develop solutions and find requirements for what needs to be done. From my experience, the biggest thing I noticed was that this approach shows that working on the issues found allows for consistent stream work but not as heavy work since it is broken up and viewed that way. Implementing Agile development is very effective and understand why there is a lot of popularity around its name. Using this technique in school projects and work has shown me it is a solid foundation to approaching issues and the concepts can even be applied to regular life if looking at it at high-level.
Another topic in Software Engineering I found interesting is the Ethics that is involved in the industry/community. Ethics can be a very general term and learning about the Ethics in Software Engineering can apply to very surface level things and very deeper things as well. Good habits, bad habits, best practices, how to ask questions, etc. A topic I found myself thinking about a lot is discourse that sometimes comes up in the Software Engineering community. To delve into an example, I personally find that most people look at open-source is a very progressive and effective way to develop but in a recent string of events that brought up a question I had. This question is, how much is too much open-source? My answer to that is there isn’t “too much” but the people using open-source code/applications must adhere to general “Ethics”. There is not always a right or wrong answer but adhering to a basic rule of behavioral practices is mandatory.
Overall, I have much more to learn. I learned what I would say is a surface level answer to my original question about Software Engineering “what does that mean?”. Although, I do have an answer, I now have many more questions to be answered in the future in my studies.