New Engineering Disciplines

The foundation of all the engineering disciplines nowadays is a totally new kind of engineering called software engineering. Every engineering project, no matter its field or purpose, starts life as a virtual project with the help of a computer and a specially designed software program nowadays. The type of software that is most synonymous with engineering is CAD, or computer assisted design, but there are also others, such as CAM, which is computer assisted manufacture.

Despite its huge success and great level of advancement, software engineering is not slowing in its pace of development as far as the engineering community is concerned. The original CAD software programs produced only 2-dimensional drawings. In very short order these progressed to 3-dimensional versions that could produce whole a whole series of technical drawings in less time than it used to take to do one.

Software Engineering and the Engineering Revolution

But even that is not the extent of the revolution in software engineering for engineers. These design programs now have many different categories of testing analysis built into the design software itself. This enables engineers to perform virtual testing and create superbly accurate virtual prototypes. To say that they have revolutionized the engineering industry really doesn't do justice to the depth and breadth of ways in which engineering has changed due to software engineering.

Whole new disciplines have grown up in engineering as software engineering brings us new technology. Take materials. Software allows scientists and engineers to actually design special composite and artificial materials that have special engineering properties. The software actually allows for the extensive testing of these materials before they are ever used. From this one can imagine in how many ways software engineering has in fact made the engineering business safer, faster, more effective and far cheaper than it ever could have been in the days before computers.