Software engineering is a detailed study of engineering to the design, development, testing, and maintenance of software applications.
Software engineers apply engineering principles and knowledge of programming languages to build software solutions for end users.
Software engineering was introduced to address the issues of low-quality software projects.
Problems arise when software generally exceeds timelines, budgets, and reduced levels of quality. It ensures that the application is built consistently, correctly, on time and on budget and within requriements. The demand for software engineering also emerged to cater to the immense rate of change in user requirements and environment on which application is supposed to be working.
More recently, it has evolved in response to factors such as the growing impact of large and expensive software systems in a wide range of situations and domains and the increased importance of software in safety-critical applications. Software engineering is different in character from other engineering disciplines due to both the intangible nature of software and the discontinuous nature of software operation. It seeks to integrate the principles of mathematics and computer science with the engineering practices developed for tangible, physical artifacts.
