Resources

Books

• The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.
• Software Project Survival Guide , by Steve McConnell.
• Code Complete, 2nd ed., by Steve McConnell.(Chapter 5: Design in Construction is available free.)
• Rapid Development, by Steve McConnell.
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides.
• Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, by Alan Shalloway and James Trott.

Articles and Web sites

• Project Ideas and Presentations
  • Ideas for startups (Graham)
  • Examples of past projects: CSE Spring '06 Projects, CSE Spring '07 Projects
• Software Development Process and Practice
  • Anchoring the Software Process, Barry Boehm, USC, 1995.
  • Joel Spolsky Site. Tips, checklists, and opinions (not universally agreed on) on software engineering practices based on experience.
  • Construx software engineering consultants, project survival guide. Holds a number of good references and templates.
  • Net Objectives software engineering consultants. Also holds a number of good references
  • Steve McConnell Site. Good resources and papers/columns on software projects and practices.
  • Pragmatic Programmer Tips
  • Chapter 1, Agile Practices, by Robert C. Martin
  • Good Enough Quality: Beyond the Buzzword by James Bach
  • Rise of Worse is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
• Specifications
  • Construx software requirements resources template.
  • Painless Functional Specs, by Joel Spolsky
  • Alistair Cockburn web site - Use Cases
• Architecture and Design
  • Software Architecture, by David Garlan.
  • On the Criteria to Be Used When Decomposing a System into Modules, by David Parnas. (Off-campus access)
  • Code Complete, Chapter 5: Design in Construction, by Steve McConnell
  • Emergent Design: Evolving Systems with High Efficiency and Low Risk, by Scott Bain, Net Objectives
• UML
  • Practical UML, Randy Miller
  • UML's Sequence Diagrams, Donald Bell
  • UML Sequence Diagrams Martin Fowler
  • UML2 extensions for Visio
• Design Patterns
  • Design Patterns Survey of common patterns, with code examples, from SourceMaking
  • A Survey of Common Design Patterns by James Maioriello
  • What are Design Patterns and Do I Need Them by James Maioriello
  • Design patterns in C#
• User Interfaces
  • User Interface Hall of Shame
  • Web Pages that Suck
• Testing
  • Daily build/smoke test
  • If You Didn't Test It, It Doesn't Work, by Bob Colwell. (UW access)
  • How Do You Spell Testing? - A Mnemonic to Jump-Start Testing, by James Bach.
• Refactoring
  • Refactoring catalog by Martin Fowler
  • Refactoring Sourcemaking Site
• Extreme Programming
  • Is design dead? by Martin Fowler
  • All I really need to know about pair programming I learned in kindergarten by Laurie Williams: Good introduction to why you would use pair programming.
  • Production Programming in the Classroom Charlie Reis, an author, was a grad student here at UW. The paper talks about experience using DrJava, open source, and extreme programming in the classroom.
• Estimation
  • Estimation Basics by Kathleen Peters, Software Productivity Center
  • Cocomo II Reference Manual
  • Cocomo II overview by The Code Project
  • Cocomo II overview by SoftStar Systems
  • Cocomo II calculator with factors by USC
  • SLOCCount tool to count lines of code
  • CodeCount tool to count sloc (open source from USC)