Software engineering is an engineering-based approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the engineering design process to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term programmer is sometimes used as a synonym, but may also refer more to implementation rather than design and can also lack connotations of engineering education or skills.

Engineering techniques are used to inform the software development process, which involves the definition, implementation, assessment, measurement, management, change, and improvement of the software life cycle process itself. It heavily uses software configuration management, which is about systematically controlling changes to the configuration, and maintaining the integrity and traceability of the configuration and code throughout the system life cycle. Modern processes use software versioning.