Software engineering sees its practitioners as individuals who follow well-defined engineering approaches to problem solving. These approaches include a variety of software engineering works and research articles, always with reference to the predictability, precision, mitigated risk and professionalism. This perspective has led to calls for a new field of licensing, certification and codified knowledge sets for the field of engineering knowledge and maturation.

Software know-how has been proposed by a body of software developers who emphasize that coding skills and the responsibility of software developers without professionalism or any prescriptive program driven ad hoc (know-how) is the key to a lack of predictability and precision. lack of risk mitigation, methods are informal and poorly defined). The Software Skills Manifesto Extends the Agile Software Manifesto  and establishes a metaphor between the development of modern software and the learning model of medieval Europe.

Software engineering extends engineering and is based on the engineering process, namely the engineering process, engineering project management, engineering requirements, technical design, technical construction and validation technical. The concept is so new that it is rarely understood and widely misinterpreted, including in software engineering textbooks, articles and programs by programmers and craftspeople.