Software engineering is not enough

Much of the software engineering literature admonishes that what practitioners are doing is not enough-that the state-of-the-practice is creating bad software. This article argues that what the literature offers as solutions is also not enough, that software development is a fundamentally technical problem for which management solutions are only partially effective. It describes a basic set of tools that developers can apply before, during, and after designing real software, often against unrealistic schedule and budgetary constraints.