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Practical Guidance on the Efficient Development of High-Quality Software
Introduction to Software Engineering, Second Edition equips students with the fundamentals to prepare them for satisfying careers as software engineers regardless of future changes in the field, even if the changes are unpredictable or disruptive in nature. Retaining the same organization as its predecessor, this second edition adds considerable material on open source and agile development models.
The text helps students understand software development techniques and processes at a reasonably sophisticated level. Students acquire practical experience through team software projects. Throughout much of the book, a relatively large project is used to teach about the requirements, design, and coding of software. In addition, a continuing case study of an agile software development project offers a complete picture of how a successful agile project can work.
The book covers each major phase of the software development life cycle, from developing software requirements to software maintenance. It also discusses project management and explains how to read software engineering literature. Three appendices describe software patents, command-line arguments, and flowcharts.
List of contents
Introduction. Project Management. Requirements. Software Design. Coding. Testing and Integration. Delivery, Installation, and Documentation. Maintenance and Software Evolution. Research Issues in Software Engineering. Appendices.
About the author
About the Author
I recently retired from being a professor of computer science at Howard University for over 25 years, with 9 of those years as a department chair. (I was a math professor for 16 years before that.) While I was department chair, we sent more students to work at Microsoft in the 2004-5 academic year than any other college or university in the United States. We also established a graduate certificate program in computer security, which became the largest certificate program at the university. I had major responsibility for working with technical personnel to keep our department's hundreds of computers functional and virus-free, while providing email service to several hundred users. We had to withstand constant hacker attacks and we learned how to reduce the vulnerability of our computer systems.
As a scholar/researcher, I studied complex computer systems and their behavior when attacked or faced with heavy, unexpected loads. I wrote five books on computing, from particular programming languages, to the internal structure of sophisticated operating systems, to the development and efficient creation of highly complex applications. My long-term experience with computers (I had my first computer programming course in 1964) has helped me understand the nature of many of the computer attacks by potential identity thieves and, I hope, be able to explain them and how to defend against them, to a general audience of non-specialists. More than 5,000 people have attended my lectures on identity theft; many others have seen them on closed-circuit television.
I have written more than twenty books, and more than 120 technical articles, most of which are in technical areas.
My interests in data storage and access meshed well with my genealogical interests when I wrote the Genealogy Technology column of the Maryland Genealogical Society Journal for several years. I was the editor or co-editor of that society’s journal for many years.
Summary
Adding material on open source and agile development models, this second edition equips students with the fundamentals to prepare them for satisfying careers as software engineers. The text helps students understand software development techniques and processes at a reasonably sophisticated level. It covers each major phase of the software devel
Additional text
Praise for the First Edition:
"The approach is practical throughout, with heavy emphasis on team projects, using the Internet as a resource, with discussion of tools in common use."
—Software Quality Professional, Vol. 3, Issue 4, September 2001
"In its second edition, Leach's work can best be described as a traditional text on software engineering. The book is conventionally organized in its presentation of the phases of software engineering. However, it is quite modern in its treatment of those phases with the author's early introduction of eight different approaches to the software life cycle. Nine chapters address various aspects of software engineering. The introductory chapter provides an overview of software engineering and different approaches to the software life cycle: the classical waterfall, rapid prototyping, the spiral model, agile programming, and others. Further chapters discuss project management tools, techniques and metrics associated with performing requirements analysis, and the software development process. However, the discussion of the development process is generically covered and does not provide significant details associated with specific programming languages or software systems. The following chapters explain how to uniformly and completely document the software system and emphasize the role of quality documentation. Each chapter offers further readings and contains suggested exercises. There are extended references and an excellent index. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals and practitioners."
—J. Beidler, University of Scranton, Choice, November 2016
