When we talk about software, we’re fundamentally talking about long strings of bits. We throw those strings of bits into machines, with the aim of getting those machines to do the things we want.

Flipping the bits is trivial. The challenge we face in software engineering is ensuring that the machine behaves, and continues to behave, in a way that meets our expectations. That’s the tricky part: changing the bits in just the right way.

Not only is this trickiness the reason why our industry exists at the scale that it does, but it’s also the reason that working within this industry can be so interesting, rewarding, and frustrating!

In this article we’re going to explore what our high-level goals are when engineering software. We’re briefly going to get a bit philosophical, but with good reason. We need to understand the roots of why we are doing what we are doing.

Before we go any further with our thinking about software engineering, we have to accept something…

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Hello! My name’s Rob Gilton. I run a company in the UK called Adventurous Machines Ltd, which has been designing and developing electronic products for just over a decade. We do a lot of embedded software engineering, and we try to do it well.

We often find ourselves taking on software projects where our clients are stuck. They’ve built something, but it has issues, and solutions need to get out of the door fast. The sticking point is that none of the project has been set up for realising change quickly and robustly.

… read more.