Software Engineering in Computer Systems

Software is simply a series of instructions and information that tell a computer how to perform a certain task. This is compared to physical hardware where the machine actually does the work and actually builds the operating system. Software on the other hand is used to manage hardware devices such as printers, keyboards, scanners, processors and so forth.

There are two types of software systems, the hardware-based system software and the application software. The hardware-based system software consists of the main memory, device driver and operating system itself. On the other hand, the application software is what controls how the device drivers are loaded into the main memory of the computer systems. They also control how the windows environment of the computer is built, what it does and so on.

Both of these computer software packages come together to form a complete operating system for the computer hardware. Hardware components consist of the main memory, CPU, hard drive, video card, sound card, Ethernet adapter and so forth. Applications are the ones that run on the computer hardware. There are a variety of different types of computer programs, such as office programs, gaming programs, audio and video programs, browser and spreadsheet programs among others.

Both hardware and application part can be updated whenever there is a new version of either of them. It is common to update both parts of a computer system at the same time though. Sometimes however, it becomes necessary to update the hardware component without updating the application part first. Updating software components is simple. For example, you update the device drivers if you have just purchased a new computer system or if you want to add new hardware such as a scanner. Updating the application components is more complex since sometimes it is not possible to replace all the missing device drivers with the latest version.

The term software engineering comes from the combination of software and hardware engineering. Software engineering deals with the planning, development, optimization, and testing of computer systems. As we can see, software engineering deals more with the usage of computers in a corporate setting. Therefore, most software engineering jobs are located in major computer industries. Some other software engineering jobs include consulting projects, education, IT administration and product design and marketing.

Software engineering is very important for a growing company. The success of a business depends on how well each part of it is used. For instance, if one department is inefficient because of a missing piece of hardware, the whole operating system would also be affected and the production of the products would then be affected.