For those of us who can remember a time before the World Wide Web, the chaotic growth of the Web applications and Systems harkens back to another era -- the early days of software, It was a time of little discipline, but enormous enthusiasm and creativity. It was a time when programmers often hacked together systems -- some good, some bad. The prevailing attitude seemed to be "Get it done fast, and get it into the field, we'll clean it up (and better understand what we really need to build) as we go." Sound familiar?

If the current ad hoc approach to the Web development persists, the Web application infrastructure that we are creating today may lead to something that might be called a "Tangled Web." This phrase to connotes a morass of poorly developed Web-based applications that have too high a probability of failure. Worse, as Web-based Systems grow more complex, a failure in one can and will propagate broad-based problems across many.

It seems that just about any important product or system is worth engineering. Before you start building it, you better understand the problem, design a workable solution, implement it in a solid way, and test it thoroughly. You should probably also control changes to it as you work and have some mechanism for ensuring the end result's quality. In this talk Dr. Pressman will discuss the need for Web engineering and its relationship to (and differences with) software engineering.

Roger S. Pressman is an internationally recognized authority in software process improvement and software engineering technologies. For over three decades, he has worked as a software engineer, a manager, a professor, an author, and a consultant, focusing on software engineering issues.