Concise Introduction to Software Engineering (eBook)

This book offers an easily accessible foundation to the topic of software engineering. It focuses on the essential elements, providing the reader with the basic skills and knowledge required to execute a software project successfully. Following the winning formula and easy-to read style of the author’s previous An Integrated Approach to Software Engineering, this reader-friendly text is written especially for undergraduates as an introduction to this broad-ranging discipline. With a strong emphasis on practice, this textbook takes a case-study approach whereby a project is developed through the course of the book, illustrating the different activities of software development. The sequence of chapters is essentially the same as the sequence of activities performed during a typical software project. Designed for undergraduates and bolstered with numerous examples and chapter summaries, this text imparts to the reader the fundamental knowledge, skills, practices and techniques within software engineering.

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An introductory course on Software Engineering remains one of the hardest subjects to teach largely because of the wide range of topics the area enc- passes. I have believed for some time that we often tend to teach too many concepts and topics in an introductory course resulting in shallow knowledge and little insight on application of these concepts. And Software Engineering is ?nally about application of concepts to e?ciently engineer good software solutions. Goals I believe that an introductory course on Software Engineering should focus on imparting to students the knowledge and skills that are needed to successfully execute a commercial project of a few person-months e?ort while employing proper practices and techniques. It is worth pointing out that a vast majority of the projects executed in the industry today fall in this scope-executed by a small team over a few months. I also believe that by carefully selecting the concepts and topics, we can, in the course of a semester, achieve this. This is the motivation of this book. The goal of this book is to introduce to the students a limited number of concepts and practices which will achieve the following two objectives: - Teach the student the skills needed to execute a smallish commercial project.