Glenn Vanderburg gave possibly the best version yet of his excellent talk ‘Real Software Engineering’ at this year’s Scottish Ruby Conference. This is the best explanation I have seen of how software developers have come to misunderstand engineering and how we might go about learning the genuine lessons that engineering has to teach us.
He also makes a very interesting point that formal mathematical modelling is, far from being the basis of all engineering techniques, a tool that is introduced to reduce costs.
Running time is about 50 minutes, and I highly recommend watching the whole video.