Software Engineer to Future

Education Software engineer

About half of all practitioners today have computer science degrees. A small, but growing, number of practitioners have software engineering degrees. In 1987 Imperial College London introduced the first three-year software engineering Bachelor's degree in the UK and the world; in the following year the University of Sheffield established a similar programme. In 1996, Rochester Institute of Technology established the first software engineering Bachelor's degree program in the United States, however, it did not obtain ABET until 2003, the same time as Rice University, Clarkson University, Milwaukee School of Engineering and Mississippi State University obtained theirs. In 1997 PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore, India was the first to start a five-year integrated Master of Science degree in Software Engineering.

Since then, software engineering undergraduate degrees have been established at many universities. A standard international curriculum for undergraduate software engineering degrees was recently defined by the CCSE. As of 2004^[update], in the U.S., about 50 universities offer software engineering degrees, which teach both computer science and engineering principles and practices. The first software engineering Master's degree was established at Seattle University in 1979. Since then graduate software engineering degrees have been made available from many more universities. Likewise in Canada, the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers has recognized several software engineering programs.

In 1998, the US Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) established the first doctorate program in Software Engineering in the world. Additionally, many online advanced degrees in Software Engineering have appeared such as the Master of Science in Software Engineering (MSE) degree offered through the Computer Science and Engineering Department at California State University, Fullerton. Steve McConnell opines that because most universities teach computer science rather than software engineering, there is a shortage of true software engineers. ETS University and UQAM were mandated by IEEE to develop the SoftWare Engineering BOdy of Knowledge SWEBOK, which has become an ISO standard describing the body of knowledge covered by a software engineer.

Profession
Employment

Most software engineers work as employees or contractors. Software engineers work with businesses, government agencies (civilian or military), and non-profit organizations. Some software engineers work for themselves as freelancers. Some organizations have specialists to perform each of the tasks in the software development process. Other organizations required software engineers to do many or all of them. In large projects, people may specialize in only one role. In small projects, people may fill several or all roles at the same time. Specializations include: in industry (analysts, architects, developers, testers, technical support, managers) and in academia (educators, researchers).

There is considerable debate over the future employment prospects for Software Engineers and other IT Professionals. For example, an online futures market called the Future of IT Jobs in America attempts to answer whether there will be more IT jobs, including software engineers, in 2012 than there were in 2002.

The status of software engineering

The word engineering within the term software engineering causes a lot of confusion because it is a shallow analogy.

The wrangling over the status of software engineering (between traditional engineers and computer scientists) can be interpreted as a fight over control of the word "engineering", similar to the historical fights over the control of the term "doctor" between physicians and other holders of doctorates.

Traditional engineers (especially civil engineers and the NSPE) claim that they have special rights over the term engineering, and for anyone else to use it requires their approval. In the mid-1990s, the NSPE sued to prevent anyone from using the job title software engineering. The NSPE won their lawsuit in 48 states. However, SE practitioners, educators, and researchers ignored the lawsuits and called themselves software engineers anyway. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics uses the term software engineer, too. The term engineering is much older than any regulatory body, so many believe that traditional engineers have few rights to control the term. As things stand at 2007, however, even the NSPE appears to have softened its stance towards software engineering and following the heels of several overseas precedents, is investigating a possibility of licensing software engineers in consultation with IEEE, NCEES and other groups "for the protection of the public health safety and welfare". 

In Canada, the use of the words 'engineer' and 'engineering' are controlled in each province by self-regulating professional engineering organizations, often aligned with geologists and geophysicists, and tasked with enforcement of the governing legislation. The intent is that any individual holding themselves out as an engineer (or geologist or geophysicist) has been verified to have been educated to a certain accredited level, and their professional practice is subject to a code of ethics and peer scrutiny.

In New Zealand, IPENZ, the professional engineering organization entrusted by the New Zealand government with legal power to license and regulate chartered engineers (CPEng), recognizes software engineering as a legitimate branch of professional engineering and accepts application of software engineers to obtain chartered status provided he or she has a tertiary degree of approved subjects. Software Engineering is included but Computer Science is normally not.


^{Source : cs.utexas.edu, peo.on.ca, wikipedia, ipenz.org.nz}

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) for IT

description for ERP

Accordingly, an entire ERP4IT approach and adequate solutions touch various IT disciplines such as:

• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
• Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
• IT Governance
• IT Service Management (ITSM)
• Application Performance Management (APM)
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
• Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM)
• Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• IT Asset Management (ITAM)
• Information Security
• Knowledge Management
• Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
• Business Service Management (BSM)

ERP is Standards and Software
Many companies have a wide range of nonintegrated solutions covering several aspects of IT Governance such as: Project Management, Portfolio Management, Time Management, Service Management, Enterprise Architecture, System Management, Security Management or Asset Management.

Unfortunately, to this day there are no known standards for such an integrative overall solution that supports what the emerging subject of ERP4IT claims to be. In the past there have been several proprietary attempts to solve various pieces of the IT puzzle. But no comprehensive, integrated solution exists.
In Europe, ERP for IT and ERP4IT are registered community trademarks of Efecte Corp.


^{ERP to Plan Software}
The term Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) might be a bit confusing because of its usage for business solutions. Enterprise resource planning software is software that can comprehensively manage the needs of a major enterprise resource area (money, productive capital, people, stock of goods or information). And of the major resource areas, only information (i.e. IT) lacks integrated vendor solutions such as those offered by SAP ERP or Oracle E-Business Suite for all the other resource areas.

Respectively, ERP4IT focuses on a broader sense as well as on the comprehensive integration of different modules like the ERP system do. ERP4IT provides a process centric solution in complex information structures, implemented in relational databases for the IT organization to manage the IT itself. Due to the given complexity of the domains involved, IT services should become transparent and enable the IT to manage organizational and technical dependencies. ERP4IT shows the cost but also the benefit of the provided services. They should be measurable and contribute as single parts to the overall business vision and strategy.
Anyway , with the right foundation on industry standards, a de facto, federated, ERP4IT solution could start to emerge - that would radically improve the efficiency of enterprise IT.


^{Source : Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco System, Information Week, kontrol-it.com, isuntangle, wikipedia}

E-Book - text and image-based publication in digital form produced on, published by, and readable on computers or other digital devices

Advantages using E-Book

There are over 2 million free books available for download as of August 2009. Mobile availability of e-books may be provided for users with a mobile data connection, so that these e-books need not be stored on the device. An e-book can be offered indefinitely, without ever going "out of print". In the space that a comparably sized print book takes up, an e-reader can potentially contain thousands of e-books, limited only by its memory capacity. If space is at a premium, such as in a backpack or at home, it can be an advantage that an e-book collection takes up little room and weight.

E-book websites can include the ability to translate books into many different languages, making the works available to speakers of languages not covered by printed translations. Depending on the device, an e-book may be readable in low light or even total darkness. Many newer readers have the ability to display motion, enlarge or change fonts, use Text-to-speech software to read the text aloud for visually impaired, partially sighted, elderly or dyslectic people, search for key terms, find definitions, or allow highlighting bookmarking and annotation. Devices that utilize E Ink can imitate the look and ease of readability of a printed work while consuming very little power, allowing continuous reading for weeks at time.

While an e-book reader costs much more than one book, the electronic texts are generally cheaper. Moreover, a great share of books are available free of charge. For example, all fiction from before the year 1900 is in the public domain. Also, libraries lend more current e-book titles for limited times, free samples are available of many publications, and there are other lending models being piloted as well. E-books can be printed for less than the price of traditional new books using new on-demand book printers.

An e-book can be purchased/borrowed, downloaded, and used immediately, whereas when one buys or borrows a book, one has to go to a bookshop or library during limited hours, or wait for a delivery. The production of e-books does not consume paper, ink, etc. Printed books use 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water to produce albeit they do not require a machine for use (out of context)Depending on possible digital rights management, e-books can be backed up to recover them in the case of loss or damage and it may be possible to recover a new copy without cost from the distributor. Compared to printed publishing, it is cheaper and easier for authors to self-publish e-books. Also, the dispersal of a free e-book copy can stimulate the sales of the printed version.


^Production
Some e-books are produced simultaneously with the production of a printed format, as described in electronic publishing, though in many instances they may not be put on sale until later. Often, e-books are produced from pre-existing hard-copy books, generally by document scanning, sometimes with the use of robotic book scanners, having the technology to quickly scan books without damaging the original print edition. Scanning a book produces a set of image files, which may additionally be converted into text format by an OCR program. Occasionally, as in some e-text projects, a book may be produced by re-entering the text from a keyboard.

As a newer development, sometimes only the electronic version of a book is produced by the publisher. It is even possible to release an e-book chapter by chapter as each chapter is written. This is useful in fields such as information technology where topics can change quickly in the months that it takes to write a typical book (See: Realtime Publishers). It is also possible to convert an electronic book to a printed book by print on demand. However these are exceptions as tradition dictates that a book be launched in the print format and later if the author wishes an electronic version is produced.

There are some parts of the industry where there are particularly notable leading firms. In the general field of science-fiction and fantasy, Baen Books, an American publishing company established in 1983 by science fiction publishing industry long-timer Jim Baen (1943–2006) has a well-established position. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that specializes in space opera/military science fiction and fantasy (though it does not restrict itself to these subgenres). It is notable for releasing books without DRM in a variety of formats, before hard-copy publication, and pre-releasing ebooks in parts before the hard-copy release. Many older titles are available for free, especially the first book in a series.


^e-Readers
e-Readers may be specifically designed for that purpose, or intended for other purposes as well. The term is restricted to hardware devices and used to describe a category type.

Specialized devices have the advantage of doing one thing well. Specifically, they tend to have the right screen size, battery lifespan, lighting and weight. A disadvantage of such devices is that they are often expensive when compared to multi-purpose devices such as laptops and PDAs.

Source : Wikipedia, Google Trends, Forbes, Highbeam, freewritingadvice, NY Times, ala.org