Importance of Software Engineering

As the application domains of software are becoming complicated and design of big software without a systematic method is virtually impossible, field of software engineering is increasingly gaining significance. It's now developing like an industry. Therefore, industry has to answer following or similar queries of clients:

1)  What is the best approach to design of software?
2)  Why the cost of software is too high?     
3)  Whycan'twe find all errors?
4)  Why is there always some gap between claimed performance and actual performance?

To answer all these queries, software development has adopted a systematic approach.

Software development shouldn't remain an art. Scientific basis for duration, cost, defects, risks etc. are required. For quality assurance, process qualities and product qualities should be made measurable as far as possible by developing metrics for them.