Software Engineering Basics

The goal of software engineering is to be discipline that provides models and processes that lead to the production of well documented maintenable software in a manner that is predictable. For a mature process it should be possible to determine in advance how much time and effort will be required to produce the final product. This can only be done using data from past experience which requires that one measure the software process.

Models of the development process are essential if it is to be possible to predict the cost of a software project. Some of what you will see in this course may seem obvious or just common sense. Experience will convince you that most software projects fail because they ignore this common sense.

Whichever model of the software process you use they will all have some things in common.

A specification phase,
A design phase,
A planning phase,
A module specification phase,
A testing phase.
Software Engineering also calls for the ability to make precise specifications of the behaviour of software systems. Several methods exist for doing this. Algebraic specification uses formal techniques based upon specification languages, the Booch method is a graphical technique for describing and thus specifying the behaviour of a system. In fact no one system is likely to be able to do everything, the best software engineers will use a mixture of these techniques.