Comment by kragen

Yes, because those would describe, respectively, faith healing, spending money whenever you happen to have bills in your pocket, and levitation through Transcendental Meditation, rather than what we currently call "medicine", "accounting", and "flight schools".

"Software engineering" as currently practiced, and as promoted by the SWEBOK, is an attempt to use management practices to compensate for lacking the requisite technical knowledge to write working software. Analogs in other fields include the Great Leap Forward in agriculture and steelmaking, the Roman Inquisition in astronomy, dowsing in petroleum exploration, Project Huemul in nuclear energy, and in some cases your example of faith healing in medicine.