The Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) is a product of the Software Engineering Coordinating Committee. The IEEE Computer Society is also involved.

: The software engineering body of knowledge is an all-inclusive term that describes the sum of knowledge within the profession of software engineering. Since it is usually not possible to put the full body of knowledge of even an emerging discipline, such as software engineering, into a single document, there is a need for a Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge. This Guide will seek to identify and describe that subset of the body of knowledge that is generally accepted, even though software engineers must be knowledgeable not only in software engineering, but also, of course, in other related disciplines. [http://www.swebok.org/overview/]

Note that this effort is quite controversial. Cem Kaner and Grady Booch are two of many who have publicly stated that the document is misguided, and the Association for Computing Machinery has withdrawn from its initial participation in the project. The document may not accurately reflect the community s view of software engineering, but more fundamentally, its primary goal is to enable the licensing of programmers — a goal which ignores the continuing (and unsolved) discussion as to whether programming is really analogous to other engineering fields.

Another effort to define a body of knowledge for software engineering is the Computing Curriculum Software Engineering (CCSE). The difference is that whereas SWEBOK defines the software engineering knowledge that practitioners should have after four years of practice, CCSE defines the knowledge that an undergraduate software engineering student should possess upon graduation (including knowledge of mathematics, general engineering principles, and other related areas).

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