Professional Issues in Software Engineering

This text is based on a course which has been taught for the past three years to final year honours students in Computing at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, although some of the material has been used over a much longer period. It is natural to ask to what extent the treatment of professional issues in software engineering needs to be different from the treatment in other engineering disciplines. Much of the material in this book is applicable to any branch of the engineering industry. The emphasis of the book, as evinced by the selection of topics and the relative weights given to them, is, however, very different from that of the more traditional texts on "Management for Engineers". Several topics: the effect of new technology on employment; the safety and reliability of computer systems; intellectual property rights in software; are matters of great professional and public concern; accordingly we have treated these topics at some length. On the other hand, because management, both project management and team management, are usually addressed directly in software engineering courses, they are treated very lightly here.
For the same reason, we have chosen to omit any treatment of the Data Protection Act. All these topics are treated at length, in the software engineering context, in many readily available texts. Apart from the different emphasis, the book also differs from books which treat professional issues in the context of other engineering disciplines in that many of our examples are chosen from the software industry. Despite these features, we would expect the book to be useful to students in related branches of engineering, such as electronics, where many of the same professional issues arise. The purpose of this book is to explain the central principles and issues in the areas covered, not to give a professional knowledge of those areas. Any one topic covered would require several volumes for a comprehensive coverage so that what is said here is, inevitably, introductory and much is omitted.