Engineering is at its heart is both an applied science and a methodology for it&#x27;s application.  So yes, software engineering is a valid form of engineering.  We&#x27;re taking computer science principles and applying them to a practical application.  We don&#x27;t write papers, but we use the knowledge to drive industry.<p>So there&#x27;s this topic of failure analysis, and we don&#x27;t always do this well in the world of software engineering.  We don&#x27;t like to analyze our failures probably as much as we should, possibly because we find them embarassing, or perhaps they might be bad PR if they were known.  So we just want to get the fix done and move on.<p>But the thing is for most software it doesn&#x27;t matter how we deal with bugs, and that&#x27;s because they cause minor problems.  But when it comes to loss of life or money, bugs do matter.  Doctors and lawyers have professional boards that oversee actions and disputes.  Airplanes and Trains have the NTSB that oversee accidents and engineering failures.  Civil engineers study the collapse of bridges as part of an effort to make bridges safer.<p>Failure in those cases are bad.<p>If my software solution is off by a few bugs, meh, so what?  It doesn&#x27;t cost the company money, usually.  And it probably didn&#x27;t kill anyone, and it probably just fixed some small css issue that looked great on firefox, but bad on chrome...