There is a seemingly never-ending debate (or perhaps unconnected conversation and misunderstandings) on whether or not the software profession is science or art, or specifically whether "doing software" is in fact an engineering discipline.

Being the pragmatist (not a flip-flopper!) I aspire to be, and avoiding hard-and-fast deterministic rules on what exactly is software development, I have to say: it's both. There is a science element, and there is an artistic element. I don't see it as a zero-sum game, and its certainly not worthy of idolatry. (Is anything?)

That said, I have to admit that lately I've started to give more weight to the "artistic" side than I previously had. There are just so many "it depends" answers to software development, that it seems like an art. But how many of the "it depends"-es are really subjective? Or, is art even subjective in the first place? Then today I remembered reading something long ago in a land far far away: that the prefix every engineer uses when answering a question is "it depends."

I think almost certainly there is much more science and engineering involved in what we do than art. But, I think there is a sizable artistic element as well. Otherwise we wouldn't use terms like "hacked a solution" (as if hacking through a jungle, not so much the positive connotation of hackers hacking), or "elegant code" or "elegant design." Much of design, while rooted in principles (hopefully, anyway), can be viewed as artistic as well.

The land far away and the time long ago involved myself as an Electrical Engineering in training. I dropped out of that after couple of years, so I don't have the full background, but most of what we were learning were the laws governing electrical circuits, physics, magnetism, and so on (I guess it's really all physics when you get right down to it). Something like that would lead you to believe that if we call this software engineering, we should have similar laws. It's not clear on the surface that we do.

But Steve McConnell posted a good rundown the other day about why the phrase "Writing and maintaining software are not engineering activities. So it's not clear why we call software development software engineering" misses the point completely.

In particular, we can treat software development as engineering - we've been doing so for quite some time. Clearly, "engineering" has won the battle. Instead, Steve lists many different questions that may be valuable to answer, and also describes many of the ways in which software development does parallel engineering.

So what do you think? In what ways is software development like engineering? In what ways is it like art?

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