CLUE Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Erlangen

Software Engineering

Modern computer systems have become very complex; funnily enough, many humans seem to trust these systems, keep on storing their valuable information in their memories, and rely on software to access and process it.

Software engineering is the discipline devoted to the systematic construction of reliable software systems. Software is developed by humans, humans make mistakes; therefore, software contains mistakes. But techniques have been developed to cope with the management of complexity and (at least partly) human error, such as using problem-oriented programming languages, comfortable debugging environments, and notations for problem analysis and systems design, to name but a few.


Jochen Leidner, 1998-04-29