Skip to main content
DORAS
DCU Online Research Access Service
Login (DCU Staff Only)
The changing role of the software engineer

Meade, Edward, O'Keeffe, Emma, Lyons, Niall, Lynch, Dean, Yilmaz, Murat ORCID: 0000-0002-2446-3224, Güleç, Ulaş, O'Connor, Rory ORCID: 0000-0001-9253-0313 and Clarke, Paul ORCID: 0000-0002-4487-627X (2019) The changing role of the software engineer. In: 26th European and Asian Conference on Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI 2019, 18-20 Sept 2019, Edinburgh, Scotland. ISBN 978-3-030-28004-8

Full text available as:

[img]
Preview
PDF - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
598kB

Abstract

In this paper we will discuss the changing role of a software engineer. We will examine this from four major standpoints, the software development life cycle, the influence of open source software, testing and deployment and the emergence of new technologies. We will first analyze what the role of a software engineer was in the past. We will examine limitations associated with software development life cycle models, and software failures that catalyzed increased importance for quality assurance. We then outline the current role of a software engineer. We discuss the impact of agile software development and automation on the software development cycle, the influence of open source software and how new technologies such as Function-as-a-Service and machine learning may impacted the role. Based on our research, we analyze why the software engineer role has changed and postulate prospective changes to the role of software engineer, and in particular how new responsibilities may affect the day to day work of future software engineers. We ultimately find that the role of a “software engineer” is nowadays widely varied and very broad, and it only generally indicates the type of work that the software engineer may undertake.

Item Type:Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Event Type:Conference
Refereed:Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords:Software Engineer; Agile; Open Source Software; Continuous Software Engineering
Subjects:Computer Science > Software engineering
DCU Faculties and Centres:DCU Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Engineering and Computing > School of Computing
Research Initiatives and Centres > Lero: The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre
Published in: Walker, Alastair and O'Connor, Rory and Messnarz, Richard, (eds.) Proceedings of the 26th European and Asian Conference on Systems, Software and Services Process Improvement (EuroSPI 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science 1060. Springer. ISBN 978-3-030-28004-8
Publisher:Springer
Official URL:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28005-5_53
Copyright Information:© 2019 Springer
Use License:This item is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. View License
Funders:Science Foundation Ireland grant 13/RC/2094 to Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre (www.lero.ie).
ID Code:23882
Deposited On:22 Oct 2019 13:48 by Thomas Murtagh . Last Modified 03 Oct 2022 13:20

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

Archive Staff Only: edit this record

Altmetric
- Altmetric
+ Altmetric
  • Student Email
  • Staff Email
  • Student Apps
  • Staff Apps
  • Loop
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us