Software Engineering

The term software engineering was coined some forty years ago to describe the discipline of developing and maintaining software systems. In his presentation, Bill will look back over the past four decades and give his views on what the software-engineering community has learned and what it seems to have continually to re-learn. Bill will talk about the successes and failures of methodologies and tools that have been developed over the years from automatic programming to open source and code re-use. Bill will also touch upon some of the human factors and sociology that surround the discipline. Bill will draw on his long experience as a practising software engineer in both small and large companies in Ottawa and the UK.

Biography of Bill Bourne

Bill Bourne received his Electrical Engineering degree from Carleton University in 1978, and joined BNR the same year. Bill has worked on many projects at Nortel over the years, both as an architect and as a manager, working on Terminals, Computer-Aided Design, the Hi-Capacity Optical platform, and many OAM projects. He is currently a Solutions Architect in the Carrier OAM R&D organization. Bill was also a principal in a successful video games company start-up, as well being involved with other consumer software product companies in the 1980s. Bill has been involved with Object-Oriented software technology since the 1980s, and helped organize the 1989 and 1990 OOPSLA conferences