The History of Software Engineering

Grady Booch, one of UML’s original authors, offers his perspective on the history of software engineering. This article is part of a theme issue on software engineering’s 50th anniversary. The Web Extra, a version of the article with an expanded bibliography, is at https://extras.computer.org/extra/mso2018050108s1.pdf.

The Origins of the Term

Many suggest it came from the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering, coined by Friedrich Bauer. Others have pointed to the 1966 letter by Anthony Oettinger in Communications of the ACM, wherein he used the term “software engineering” to make the distinction between computer science and the building of software-intensive systems.¹ Even earlier, in the June 1965 issue of Computers and Automation, there appeared a classified ad seeking a “systems software engineer.”