Is software development an art, a craft, science, engineering, or something else entirely? Does it even matter?

Yes, it does matter, and it matters to you. Your actions and their results will differ depending on which of those is more correct.

The main thing is this: You want your software out soon and relatively defect-free, but more than that, you need a way to examine how your team is doing along the way.

Purpose

It is time to reexamine the notions underlying software development.

The trouble is that as we look at projects, what we notice is constrained by what we know to notice. We learn to distinguish distinct and separable things in the extremely rich stream of experience flowing over us, and we pull those things out of the stream for examination. To the extent that we lack various key distinctions, we overlook things that are right in front of us.

We anchor the distinctions in our memories with words and use those words to reflect on our experiences. To the extent that we lack words to anchor the distinctions, we lack the ability to pull our memories into our conversations and the ability to construct meaningful strategies for dealing with the future.

In other words, to reexamine the notions that underlie software development, we have to reconsider the distinctions that we use to slice up our experience and the words we use to anchor our memories.

This is, of course, a tall order for any book. It means that some of the earlier parts of this book will be rather abstract. I see no way around it, though.

The last time people constructed a vocabulary for software development was in the late 1960s, when they coined the phrase software engineering, as both a wish and a direction for the future.

It is significant that at the same time the programming-should-be-engineering pronouncement was made, Gerald Weinberg was writing The Psychology of Computer Programming. In that book, software development doesn't look very much like an engineering discipline at all. It appears to be something very human centric and communication centric. Of the two, Weinberg's observations match what people have reported in the succeeding 30 years, and software engineering remains a wishful term.