Software Engineering

Firstly, I must apologize. My blog has been dead. But the development frenzy @ Mishmash is on. :) Anyways, like Dr. Ben says, better late than never.

Anyways, I have got a brief summary on what Software Engineering is after reading a few blogs :P

To be very honest, when I joined this course all I was thinking about was picking up programming skills. Mine were very near the bottom part of the lowest pit and I thought that by being part of CS3216 I would be forced to learn to program. But over the course of the last 8 weeks, I've realized that programming is only a PART. To be really honest, whenever people said that programming is not the most important part - I never really believed them. Maybe because I couldn't program, I felt it was the biggest barrier to executing an idea I had. But after working - especially on a user-driven platform like Facebook - I realize the importance of people . It takes people to understand other people. It takes people to understand that there are millions of tools out there. It takes people to realize an idea. And it the people in the millions of facebook users we are trying to capture who will ultimately judge months of our work in the flicker of a second.

That said, I realize now why the emphasis is always on drawing out the DB Schema first. It forces you to think through all the possibilities. Though our group is still not using SCRUM, we have still thought it out using the traditional pen and paper. It also matters so much that you do this in a group. Comes down to people again. While 4 people in a group is a convinient number, it may not be very ideal I think as the possibilities of missing out stuff is quite high. However, I am really amazed to know that Wei Man worked with 80 people!

Which ultimately boils down to the fact that co-ordination and same-line-of-thought are very important for effective contribution. And Software engineering is all about engineering and managing tools available to achieve this. :)