Is It Really "Engineering"?

There's an old quote that says anything where people feel the need to include the word "science" isn't a science. And, yes, the original author was talking about computer science. But perhaps we should be wary of the attribution of "engineering" to requirements engineering. Engineering is, after all, the application of science to the manufacture of artifacts, while requirements engineering is the application of social science (the warning is firing again!) to the business of improving a social system. Really, it's a transformation of some fields of social science (politics, economics, anthropology, ethnography, and geography) to other fields of social science (sociology and business studies) with some software created to effect the transformation. (Shortly after I finished writing this section, Paul Ralph submitted a paper to ArXiv describing the rational and alternative paradigms—http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.5938v1...