This open access book includes contributions by leading researchers and industry thought leaders on various topics related to the essence of software engineering and their application in industrial projects. It offers a broad overview of research findings dealing with current practical software engineering issues and also pointers to potential future developments. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of adesso AG, adesso gathered some of the pioneers of software engineering including Manfred Broy, Ivar Jacobson and Carlo Ghezzi at a special symposium, where they presented their thoughts about latest software engineering research and which are part of this book. This way it offers readers a concise overview of the essence of software engineering, providing valuable insights into the latest methodological research findings and adesso’s experience applying these results in real-world projects.
SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods and Theory) is an international initiative designed to identify a common ground, or universal standard, for software engineering. It is supported by some of the most distinguished contributors to the field. Creating a simple language to describe methods and practices, the SEMAT team expresses this common ground as a kernel–or framework–of elements essential to all software development. The Essence of Software Engineering introduces this kernel and shows how to apply it when developing software and improving a team’s way of working. It is a book for software professionals, not methodologists. Its usefulness to development team members, who need to evaluate and choose the best practices for their work, goes well beyond the description or application of any single method. “Software is both a craft and a science, both a work of passion and a work of principle. Writing good software requires both wild flights of imagination and creativity, as well as the hard reality of engineering tradeoffs. This book is an attempt at describing that balance.” —Robert Martin (unclebob) “The work of Ivar Jacobson and his colleagues, started as part of the SEMAT initiative, has taken a systematic approach to identifying a ‘kernel’ of software engineering principles and practices that have stood the test of time and recognition.” —Bertrand Meyer “The software development industry needs and demands a core kernel and language for defining software development practices—practices that can be mixed and matched, brought on board from other organizations; practices that can be measured; practices that can be integrated; and practices that can be compared and contrasted for speed, quality, and price. This thoughtful book gives a good grounding in ways to think about the problem, and a language to address the need, and every software engineer should read it.” —Richard Soley
An approach to software design that introduces a fully automated analysis giving designers immediate feedback, now featuring the latest version of the Alloy language. In Software Abstractions Daniel Jackson introduces an approach to software design that draws on traditional formal methods but exploits automated tools to find flaws as early as possible. This approach—which Jackson calls “lightweight formal methods” or “agile modeling”—takes from formal specification the idea of a precise and expressive notation based on a tiny core of simple and robust concepts but replaces conventional analysis based on theorem proving with a fully automated analysis that gives designers immediate feedback. Jackson has developed Alloy, a language that captures the essence of software abstractions simply and succinctly, using a minimal toolkit of mathematical notions. This revised edition updates the text, examples, and appendixes to be fully compatible with Alloy 4.
Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its life? Based on their experience at Google, software engineers Titus Winters and Hyrum Wright, along with technical writer Tom Manshreck, present a candid and insightful look at how some of the world’s leading practitioners construct and maintain software. This book covers Google’s unique engineering culture, processes, and tools and how these aspects contribute to the effectiveness of an engineering organization. You’ll explore three fundamental principles that software organizations should keep in mind when designing, architecting, writing, and maintaining code: How time affects the sustainability of software and how to make your code resilient over time How scale affects the viability of software practices within an engineering organization What trade-offs a typical engineer needs to make when evaluating design and development decisions
Right Your Software and Transform Your Career Righting Software presents the proven, structured, and highly engineered approach to software design that renowned architect Juval Löwy has practiced and taught around the world. Although companies of every kind have successfully implemented his original design ideas across hundreds of systems, these insights have never before appeared in print. Based on first principles in software engineering and a comprehensive set of matching tools and techniques, Löwy’s methodology integrates system design and project design. First, he describes the primary area where many software architects fail and shows how to decompose a system into smaller building blocks or services, based on volatility. Next, he shows how to flow an effective project design from the system design; how to accurately calculate the project duration, cost, and risk; and how to devise multiple execution options. The method and principles in Righting Software apply regardless of your project and company size, technology, platform, or industry. Löwy starts the reader on a journey that addresses the critical challenges of software development today by righting software systems and projects as well as careers—and possibly the software industry as a whole. Software professionals, architects, project leads, or managers at any stage of their career will benefit greatly from this book, which provides guidance and knowledge that would otherwise take decades and many projects to acquire. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.
Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation is a practical guide to experimentation in a field which has long been underpinned by suppositions, assumptions, speculations and beliefs. It demonstrates to software engineers how Experimental Design and Analysis can be used to validate their beliefs and ideas. The book does not assume its readers have an in-depth knowledge of mathematics, specifying the conceptual essence of the techniques to use in the design and analysis of experiments and keeping the mathematical calculations clear and simple. Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation is practically oriented and is specially written for software engineers, all the examples being based on real and fictitious software engineering experiments.
Most people have experienced--at least once in their lives--the incomparable thrill of being part of a great team effort. They can remember the unity of purpose they experienced, the powerful passion that inspired them, and the incredible results they achieved. People who have been on a great team can attest that the difference between being on a team with a shared vision and being on a team without one is the difference between joy and misery. In 1996, Jim and Michele McCarthy, after successful careers leading software development teams at Microsoft and elsewhere, set out to discover a set of repeatable group behaviors that would always lead to the formation of a state of shared vision for any team. They hoped for a practical, communicable, and reliable process that could be used to create the best possible teams every time it was applied. They established a hands-on laboratory for the study and teaching of high-performance teamwork. In a controlled simulation environment, their principle research and teaching effort--the McCarthy Software Development BootCamp--challenged dozens of real-world, high-tech teams to produce and deliver a product. Teams were given a product development assignment, and instructed to form a team, envision the product, agree on how to make it, then design, build, and ship it on time. By repeating these simulations time after time, with the new teams building on the learning from previous teams, core practices emerged that were repeatedly successful. These were encoded as patterns and protocols. Software for Your Head is the first publication of the most significant results of the authors' unprecedented five-year investigation into the dynamics of contemporary teams. The information in this book will provide a means for any team to create for itself a compelling state of shared vision. 0201604566B09042001
- Opens the black box of methodologies and demonstrates that software development is fundamentally a value creation process - Covers new and radical approaches to software development that respond to business demands for shorter investment periods and increased agility - Provides software engineers tools for understanding enterprise-level value creation and managing financial objectives
Praise from the Reviewers: "The practicality of the subject in a real-world situation distinguishes this book from others available on the market." —Professor Behrouz Far, University of Calgary "This book could replace the computer organization texts now in use that every CS and CpE student must take. . . . It is much needed, well written, and thoughtful." —Professor Larry Bernstein, Stevens Institute of Technology A distinctive, educational text onsoftware performance and scalability This is the first book to take a quantitative approach to the subject of software performance and scalability. It brings together three unique perspectives to demonstrate how your products can be optimized and tuned for the best possible performance and scalability: The Basics—introduces the computer hardware and software architectures that predetermine the performance and scalability of a software product as well as the principles of measuring the performance and scalability of a software product Queuing Theory—helps you learn the performance laws and queuing models for interpreting the underlying physics behind software performance and scalability, supplemented with ready-to-apply techniques for improving the performance and scalability of a software system API Profiling—shows you how to design more efficient algorithms and achieve optimized performance and scalability, aided by adopting an API profiling framework (perfBasic) built on the concept of a performance map for drilling down performance root causes at the API level Software Performance and Scalability gives you a specialized skill set that will enable you to design and build performance into your products with immediate, measurable improvements. Complemented with real-world case studies, it is an indispensable resource for software developers, quality and performance assurance engineers, architects, and managers. It is anideal text for university courses related to computer and software performance evaluation and can also be used to supplement a course in computer organization or in queuing theory for upper-division and graduate computer science students.
This book discusses how model-based approaches can improve the daily practice of software professionals. This is known as Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) or, simply, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). MDSE practices have proved to increase efficiency and effectiveness in software development, as demonstrated by various quantitative and qualitative studies. MDSE adoption in the software industry is foreseen to grow exponentially in the near future, e.g., due to the convergence of software development and business analysis. The aim of this book is to provide you with an agile and flexible tool to introduce you to the MDSE world, thus allowing you to quickly understand its basic principles and techniques and to choose the right set of MDSE instruments for your needs so that you can start to benefit from MDSE right away. The book is organized into two main parts. The first part discusses the foundations of MDSE in terms of basic concepts (i.e., models and transformations), driving principles, application scenarios, and current standards, like the well-known MDA initiative proposed by OMG (Object Management Group) as well as the practices on how to integrate MDSE in existing development processes. The second part deals with the technical aspects of MDSE, spanning from the basics on when and how to build a domain-specific modeling language, to the description of Model-to-Text and Model-to-Model transformations, and the tools that support the management of MDSE projects. The second edition of the book features: a set of completely new topics, including: full example of the creation of a new modeling language (IFML), discussion of modeling issues and approaches in specific domains, like business process modeling, user interaction modeling, and enterprise architecture complete revision of examples, figures, and text, for improving readability, understandability, and coherence better formulation of definitions, dependencies between concepts and ideas addition of a complete index of book content In addition to the contents of the book, more resources are provided on the book's website http://www.mdse-book.com, including the examples presented in the book.