外文翻译 - 软件和软件工程.docVIP

外文文献 Software and software engineering —the software appearance and enumerates As the decade of the 1980s began, a front page story in business week magazine trumpeted the following headline:” software: the new driving force/’software had come of age—it had become a topic for management conccm. during the mid-1980s,a cover story in forcune lamented “A Growing Gap in Software,’’and at the close of the decade, business week warned managers about”the Software Trap—Automate or else/’As the 1990s dawned , a feature story in Newsweek asked ’’Can We Trust Our Software? ’and The wall street journal related a major software company’s travails with a front page article entitled “Creating New Software Was an Agonizing Task ...” these headlines, and many others like them, were a harbinger of a new understanding of the importance of computer software — the opportunities that it offers and the dangers that it poses. Software has now surpassed hardware as the key to the success of many computer-based systems. Whether a computer is used to run a business, control a product, or enable a system , software is the factor that differentiates . The completeness and timeliness of information provided by software (and related databases) differentiate one company from its competitors. The design and “human friendliness” of a software product differentiate it from competing products with an otherwise similar function .The intelligence and function provided by embedded software often differentiate two similar industrial or consumer products. It is software that can make the difference. During the first three decades of the computing era, the primary challenge was to develop computer hardware that reduced the cost of processing and storing data .Throughout the decade of the 1980s,advances in microelectronics resulted in more computing power at increasingly lower cost. Today, the problem is different .The primary challenge during the 1990s is to improve the quality ( and reduce the cost) of com