Software Engineering: Theory and Practice

Book Description

KEY BENEFIT: This introduction to software engineering and practice addresses both procedural and object-oriented development.

KEY TOPICS: Is thoroughly updated to reflect significant changes in software engineering, including modeling and agile methods. Emphasizes essential role of modeling design in software engineering. Applies concepts consistently to two common examples - a typical information system and a real-time system. Combines theory with real, practical applications by providing an abundance of case studies and examples from the current literature.

MARKET: A useful reference for software engineers.

About the Author

Shari Lawrence Pfleeger (Ph.D., Information Technology and Engineering, George Mason University; M.S., Planning, The Pennsylvania State University; M.A., Mathematics, The Pennsylvania State University; B.A., Mathematics with high honors, Harpur College, Binghamton, NY) is a senior researcher at RAND’s Arlington, VA office where she helps organizations and government agencies understand whether and how information technology supports their mission and goals. Dr. Pfleeger began her career as a mathematician and then a software developer and maintainer for real-time, business-critical software systems. From 1982 to 2002, Dr. Pfleeger was president of Systems/Software, Inc., a consultancy specializing in software engineering and technology. From 1997 to 2000, she was also a visiting professor at the University of Maryland's computer science department. In the past, she was founder and director of Howard University's Center for Research in Evaluating Software Technology (CREST), and was a visiting scientist at the City University (London) Centre for Software Reliability, principal scientist at MITRE Corporation's Software Engineering Center, and manager of the measurement program at the Contel Technology Center (named by the Software Engineering Institute as one of the best such programs in the country). Dr. Pfleeger is well-known for her work in software quality, software assurance, and empirical studies of software engineering; she is particularly known for her multi-disciplinary approach to solving information technology problems.

She is also well-known for her publications, many of which are required reading in software engineering curricula, including "Software Engineering: Theory and Practice" (3rd edition, with Joanne Atlee, 2005, Prentice Hall), "Security in Computing" (3rd edition, with Charles P. Pfleeger, 2003, Prentice Hall), "Solid Software" (2001, with Les Hatton and Charles Howell, Prentice Hall), and "Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach" (2nd edition, with Norman Fention, 1996, Boyd and Fraser Publishers). Dr. Pfleeger is book review editor for IEEE Security and Privacy. For several years, she was the associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Software, where she edited the Quality Time column, and then associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. From 1998 to 2002, she was a member of the editorial board of Prentice Hall's Software Quality Institute series. She is a senior member of IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Joanne M. Atlee is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her research program focuses on software modeling, documentation, and analysis, with a particular emphasis on what she calls practical formalisms: specification and design notations that are practitioner-friendly but have a precise semantics suitable for automated analysis. More recently, she has been working on configurable model-driven development, whereby modeling notations, analysis tools, and code generators can be configured via semantics parameters.

Atlee was the founding Director of Waterloo’s Software Engineering degree program. She served on the Steering Committee for the Computing Curricula Software Engineering volume, co-sponsored by IEEE-CS and ACM. She is the vice chair of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.9 on software requirements engineering. Atlee was the program-committee chair for the International Conference on Requirements Engineering in 2005 (RE'05), and will be co-chair of the program committee for the International Conference on Software Engineering in 2009 (ICSE'09). She is a co-author with Shari Lawrence Pfleeger on the textbook "Software Engineering - Theory and Practice."

Customer Reviews

Having just last year completed a Masters of IT, undertaken to bring my IT knowledge and IT skills up-to-date, may I say that I was faced with either keeping my lecture and tutorial notes (including handwritten annotations and assignments), or, alternatively, retaining (or buying) the textbooks that I had either bought (or borrowed from the library) ...

For some subjects, I adjudge it better value to keep the lecture notes etc etc ... yet, for a few subjects, such as software engineering, I think it better value to buy the textbooks to add to my professional reference library! Given my background as being a mathematics graduate who has tried to make a living with whatever IT knowledge and IT skills I have picked up along the way, may I recommend this book as the one I've assessed the best recently published general survey of software engineering that I've been able to find!!

And, it has an excellent annotated references section pp709-744 that would prove ever so useful were I need to research any topic in more depth ...

For those whose strength is in systems analysis and design, much of the material may be too detailed; for those like myself a bit convergent psychologically who find testing and programming and troubleshooting much easier tasks, it provides the material to improve our skills with a view to bolstering our credibility, whilst we seek job roles where we can display our talents! As Frederick Brooks has advocated (elsewhere), software development teams need to subspecialise with people given job responsibilities than correspond to their strengths in order to get best value for the project sponsors ... Chapter 14 "The Future Of Software Engineering" bodes ill for the computer cowboys - some of whom are the best creatives around - in its advocacy of professionalisation and certification. These two will soon change the face of the IT employment market, as the need to prevent aeroplane accidents, ensure car self parking systems are safe, and stop medical malpractice events arising from insufficiently quality assured (and inadequately tested) equipment leads to legislatively prescribed employment requirements.

For both the student and the professional reference library.

Read last year as part of University studies. This book is a must read for anyone getting into the world of software engineering. It does not teach coding. It teaches the overall process of engineering from requirements, analysis, design, work effort, build, documentation, testing, roll out, maintenance and other areas of software engineering.