Software engineering involves analyzing, designing, implementing, and maintaining software through a standard lifecycle process. This includes planning the system requirements, analyzing those requirements, designing logical and physical system specifications, implementing the system by coding and testing it, and maintaining the system with repairs and improvements. Two common models for the software development process are the waterfall model, where each phase must be completed before moving to the next in a linear fashion, and the incremental model, where an initial simplified system is developed and then improved through iterative additions of more details and functionality.