What’s in the Title
Software development profession has severe identify crisis. From, very start its process were borrowed from other engineering principles, primarily Civil Engineering or Manufacturing. People compared building software development to construction and came up with the waterwall based processes. Educational institutes started programs for Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information System, but what the hell that exactly means.
There is no minimum boundar to software development field, there is no professional certification to enter this field. Unlike other fields, you don’t need degree to enter this field. Similarly, titles in this field have been a great source of confusion. What is difference between Programmer, Developer or Software Engineer. Yeah some people consider Developer to be generalist and Programmer to be specialists, and Software Engineer sound like we are doing real engineering but it means little to most people. Similarly, senior titles are equally meaningless, most companies don’t understand difference between Senior Software Engineer or Developer, System Analysts or lately they have been calling Architect. Many other people have expressed similar views and have introduced other titles like Craftman, Hacker, or Gardner.
Writing software matches closely with art, so it is very hard to define, develop or track. Though, some aspects for software development can engineered, and there are tons of methodologies that keep trying it. Nevertheless, most productive environments have very little process and methodologies