By Jim Reavis (jim@reavis.org)

In the grand scheme of things, software engineering is a relatively new, yet very complex discipline. Major commercial software applications and even some proprietary internal applications have millions of lines of code. With so much code, the law of averages seems to ensure that a certain amount of bugs are always going to reside in our software, some having severe security ramifications. Some people balk at even describing the discipline as software engineering, saying that it lacks many of the underlying foundations, rules and boundaries of other traditional engineering disciplines. Certainly we can agree that software is developed in many different ways, with varying degrees of compliance with best practices and standards.

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