List of software engineering topics Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
This list complements the software engineering article, giving more details and examples.
Applications influence software engineering by pressuring developers to solve problems in new ways. For example, consumer software emphasizes low cost, medical software emphasizes high quality, and Internet commerce software emphasizes rapid development.
Influence on society
Software engineers affect society by creating applications. These applications produce value for users, and sometimes produce disasters.Applications
Software engineers build applications that people use.Disasters
Software has played a role in many high-profile disasters.Technologies and practices
Skilled software engineers use technologies and practices from a variety of fields to improve productivity and quality. These technologies and practices affects applications by making better programes easier and faster to write. The following technologies and practices are used in industry every day.Software engineering topics
Many technologies and practices are (mostly) unique to software engineering,
though many of these are shared with computer science.Programming languages
Programming paradigm, based on a programming language technology
Databases
Graphical user interfaces
Programming tools
Libraries
Design languages
Patterns, document many common programming and project management techniques
Processes and methodologies
Platformss
A platform combines computer hardware and an operating system. As platforms become more powerful and less expensive, applications and tools become more widely available.
Other Practices
Other tools
Computer science topics
Skilled software engineers know a lot of computer science including what is possible and impossible, and what is easy and hard for software.
Mathematics topics
Discrete mathematics is a key foundation of software engineering.
Life cycle phases
- Development life cycle phase
- Requirements gathering
- Requirements analysis
- Software architecture
- Computer programming
- Testing, detects bugs
- Black box testing
- White box testing
- Clear box testing
- Quality assurance, ensures compliance with process.
- Product Life cycle phase and Project lifecycle
- Inception
- First development
- Major release
- Minor release
- Bug fix release
- Maintenance
- Obsolesence
- Release development stage, near the end of a release cycle
- Alpha
- Beta
- Gold master
- 1.0
- Software development lifecycle
- Waterfall model - Structured programming and Stepwise refinement
- SSADM
- Spiral model - Iterative development
- DSDM
- Chaos model - Chaos strategy
Deliverables
Deliverables must be developed for many SE projects. Software engineers rarely make all of these deliverables themselves. They usually cooperate with the writers, trainers, installers, marketers, technical support people, and others who make many of these deliverables.
- Application - the software
- Database - schemas and data.
- Documentation, online and/or print, FAQ, Readme, Help, for each role
- User
- Administrator
- Manager
- Buyer
- Administration and Maintenance policy, what should be backed-up, checked, configured, ...
- Installers
- Migration
- Upgrade from previous installations
- Upgrade from competitor's installations
- Training materials, for each role
- User
- Administrator
- Manager
- Buyer
- Support info for computer support groups.
- Marketing and sales materials
- White papers, explain the technologies used in the applications
- Comparisons with competitor products
Business roles
- Operations
- Development
- Analysts
- Programmers
- Testers
- Managers
- Business
- Academe
- Educators
- Researchers
Management topics
- Leadership
- Coaching
- Communication, SEs easily ignore this
- Listening
- Motivation
- Vision, SEs are good at this
- Example, everyone follows a good example best
- Personnel management
- Hiring, getting people into an organization
- Staffing, getting people onto a project
- Training
- Evaluation
- Project management
- Goal setting
- Customer interaction (Rethink)
- Estimation
- Risk management
- Change management
- Process management
- Processes
- Software development processes
- Methodologies
- Metrics
- Processes
Business topics
- Quality programs
Community topics
Pioneers
Many people made important contributions to SE technologies, practices, or applications.- John Backus: Fortran, first optimizing compiler, BNF
- Vic Basili: Experience factory.
- Kent Beck: Refactoring, extreme programming, pair programming, test-driven development.
- Tim Berners-Lee: World wide web
- Barry Boehm: SE economics, COCOMO, Spiral model.
- Grady Booch: Object-oriented design, UML.
- Fred Brooks: Managed System 360 and OS 360. Wrote The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet.
- Edsger Dijkstra: Wrote Notes on Structured Programming, A Discipline of Programming and Go To Statement Considered Harmful, algorithms, formal methods, pedegogy.
- Michael Fagan: Software inspection.
- Tom Gilb: Evolutionary processes.
- Grace Hopper: The first compiler (Mark 1), COBOL, Nanoseconds.
- Watts Humphrey: Capability Maturity Model, headed (founded?) the Software Engineering Institute.
- Jean Ichbiah: Ada
- Bill Joy: Berkeley Unix, vi, Java.
- Brian Kernighan: C and Unix.
- Donald Knuth: Wrote The Art of Computer Programming, TeX, algorithms, literate programming
- Bertrand Meyer: Design by Contract, Eiffel programming language.
- Peter G. Neumann: Computer risks, ACM Sigsoft.
- David Parnas: Module design, social responsibility, professionalism.
- Jef Raskin: Developed the original Macintosh GUI
- Dennis Ritchie: C and Unix.
- Winston W. Royce: Waterfall model.
- Mary Shaw: Software architecture.
- Richard Stallman: Founder of the Free Software Foundation
- Linus Torvalds: Linux kernel, open source development.
- Will Tracz: Reuse, ACM Software Engineering Notes.
- Gerald Weinberg: Wrote The Psychology of Computer Programming.
- Jeanette Wing: Formal specifications.
- Ed Yourdon: Structured programming, wrote The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
Notable publications
- About Face by Alan Cooper, about user interface design.
- The Capability Maturity Model by Watts Humphrey. Written for the Software Engineering Institute, emphasizing management and process.
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond about open source development.
- The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer by Ed Yourdon predicts the end of software development in the U.S.
- Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
- ''Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful by Edsger Dijkstra.
- The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, about project management.
- Object-oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch.
- Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.
- Principles of Software Engineering Management by Tom Gilb about evolutionary processes.
- The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. Written as an independent consultant, partly about his years at IBM.
- by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts.
- Important publications in software engineering in CS.
Professional topics
Odds and ends
Related fields
Different languages
- In Chinese, software engineer is called ruan jian gong cheng shi —— 软件工程师
- In German, software engineering is called Softwaretechnik.
- In Spanish, software engineering is called Ingenierķa de software,
Miscellaneous and to do
- Complexity or scaling
- Software brittleness problem
- Second system syndrome
- Software specialists share common language, terminology, certification, and so on.
- Traditional engineers frequently resort to a balance of factors to achieve optimization.
- Biology and biological engineering have other issues.
- Source code escrow
- Feature interaction problem
See also
- SWEBOK Software engineering body of knowledge
- CCSE Computing curriculum for software engineering
- Computer terms etymology, the origins of computer terms
External links
- Professional Organizations
- Professionalism
- Education
- Standards
- Government organizations
- Agile
- Other Organizations
- Demographics
- Surveys
- Other
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