Software Engineering Term Meanings

subtitle: what they really mean.

Anybody who's sat through a class or seminar on software engineering may encounter a lot of unfamiliar terms and concepts previously unheard of, such as measuring effort in terms of "manday" units and realizing that software engineering is about as boring as watching water plants grow in the Sahara.

In an effort to address the problem of unfamiliarity, I've taken the liberty of defining SE terms and what they REALLY mean when applied to you and your project.


Mandays - basic unit of measuring effort and time, often used at the start of the project to overestimate the size of the endeavor and then used at the latter parts of the project to denote how many days you still have to do overtime to catch up.

SDLC - Software Development Life Cycle. Describes the procedures that you will not be following throughout the project. Standard format is as follows: Requirements gathering - System design - Development - Quality Check - Sudden Inexplicable death of the project.

Cost Estimation - The process of calculating all possible effort needed in the project, factoring in the assumed risks and the profitable amount of slack that can be used to compensate any problems, then printing the estimate document, placing it in front of the table in the meeting of the clients office, and watching the clients squat over the document and take a solid dump on it, while staring at the project manager squarely in the eyes.

Project Management - The art of making sure developers look like theyre doing something even when they're not and making sure the clients look like they're getting what they want even though they're not.

Best Practices - A myth told to kids so they'd grow up wanting to become IT people.

System Requirements - A jumbled up definition of what the user likes to daydream of when not using company internet to surf for porn. This serves as a guide for when investigators are checking for the cause of a system analyst's suicide.

System Design - A system analyst's way of trying to make sense of the system requirements, which is basically like trying to find a pattern in television static. The System Design document boasts many uses for the developers, but are mainly recognized for their ability to keep bodies warm when burned during wintertime.

Project Phase - An organizational unit for dividing projects into several segments to make sure that even though the project will be a total failure, partial money will be earned off of it.

Quality Assurance - The fine fine art of developers washing their hands of their work so if in the future their programs dont work, they always have somebody to blame for not being able to spot their own bastardous mistakes for them.

Production Launch - Kind of like true love. Everybody dreams of it. Few ever find it. Even fewer people survive it long enough to enjoy its benefits.

System Developers - You poor bastards.