Through the various stages of my career, I have met several people that knew how to code; people whose skill level ranged from beginner to, what some would refer to as, guru. All those people had different backgrounds and worked for both start-ups and large organizations. For some, coding was seen as a natural progression from their CS studies, while others turned to coding as part of a career change decision.
Regardless of all these differences, all of them had one thing in common: when asked to describe their current role, all of them used the term software engineer. It is quite a common practice for job candidates to use this term in their CVs as the means to set themselves apart from a globally distributed pool of software developers. A quick random sampling of job specs published online reveals that a lot of companies – and especially high-profile start-ups – also seem to subscribe to this way of thinking, as evidenced by their search for professionals to fill software engineering roles. In reality, as we will see in this chapter, the term software engineer is more of an umbrella term that covers a wide gamut of bespoke roles, each one combining different levels of software development expertise with specialized skills pertaining to topics such as system design, testing, build tools, and operations management.
So, what is software engineering and how does it differ from programming? What set of skills should a software engineer possess and which models, methodologies, and frameworks are at their disposal for facilitating the delivery of complex pieces of software? These are some of the questions that will be answered in this chapter.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- A definition of software engineering
- The types of software engineering roles that you may encounter in contemporary organizations
- An overview of popular software development models and which one to select based on the project type and requirements