Towards a Mature Software Industry

!Articles series by: ''[Aly Saleh| http://www.egjug.org/user/2]'' \\ ''In this article, and its successors the author will try to discuss the current status of the Egyptian Software Industry and how it can be improved to be a more mature industry in the coming few years.'' ---------------------------------- !!'' Software Industry between professionalism and hobby '' \\ There is no doubt that the software industry is the same as any other industry in the fact that it has many factors that affect its maturity and improvement. However, unlike most of other industries it depends primarily on humans as the main vital value and asset in it. In this article, and maybe the ones to follow, I will try to highlight the current status of the Egyptian software industry and how it can be improved to be a matured industry in the coming few years. The human factor will be the maturity factor that will be discussed in this article. '' "The more professionals the industry has; the more mature it will be" '', this is almost true when we speak about software industry. Hence, we can say that if we need a mature software industry we need professional software engineers to build it, not just some brilliant hobbyists coders and designers, because maturity is beyond writing brilliant pieces of codes. When we speak about software engineers, we are speaking about quality, predictable results, responsibility, commitment, regulations and ethics, each point from these needs some explanation which I will do in later articles. First let me state the meaning of word Engineer. According to [Watts S. Humphrey| http://www.sei.cmu.edu/tsp/watts-bio.html] '' "An engineer is some one who knows how to consistently and predictably do quality work, and the difference between a licensed engineer and any other technical worker is that the engineer knows the proper ways to do his or her job and is required by law to work that way regardless of management, customer or other pressures" '' [Watts S. Humphrey PSP 2005| http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321305493/ref=pd_sim_b_2/002-8749522-6073627?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155] Now, it is clear that mature software industry needs professional software engineers? And now, I want to every one to ask one’s self, Are we professional software engineers? and How can we be professional software engineers? These questions may appear hard for some of us and may appear easy for others but in all cases, these questions won’t be answered in this article, the answers and the rest of our discussion will be in my next article where I will mainly speak about people's maturity. \\ \\ \\ ------------------------------------------------------------------- !!About the author: ''Aly Saleh'', B.Sc. in Computer Science, M.Sc. in Software Engineering from [Cairo University| http://www.fci-cu.edu.eg] (onwards). He is a founder member of the Egyptian Software Engineers Association-ESEA. \\ Currently, he is employed by [ITWorx| http://www.itworx.com] ''the leading professional services'' firm as a Software Engineer for telecom services, also he was working for NTG Clarity ''the leading Telecom OSS provider'' as a software Engineer, he has a wide technical experience in software development and architectures, and his business domain knowledge is mainly in Telecom.