Software engineering

Software engineering is "the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software".

The approaches used vary greatly. There are object-oriented, function-oriented, rules-based, state machine, and other approaches. There are also different processes in use, including waterfall, iterative, and agile. In addition, there are many techniques that are used with one or more of these approaches, some being applicable across the board and some only applying in a subset of approaches.

References

1. “IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology,” IEEE std 610.12-1990, 1990.