Professional Masters Degree Program

CSE 584: Software Engineering, Winter 1997

Readings

• 1. 4/1/97, Introduction
  
  
  • (*) Brooks, Mythical Man Month.
    This is a classic that everyone should read; the Anniversary Edition includes some more recent material, including the broadly discussed article, "No Silver Bullet." (This is the only reading not included in the packet; it's available at the UW Bookstore.)

  • (*, skim) Boehm, B.W., Software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-25, 12, pp. 1226-1241 (December 1976).
    This is a classic article laying out conventional military-industrial complex software engineering. If nothing else, it's interesting to contrast the material to the way current shrinkwrap software is engineered.

  • Wayt, G.W., Software's chronic crisis. Scientific American (International Edition), 271,3, pp. 72-81 (September 1994).
    There is virtually nothing in this article that I agree with, but it lays out some issues that arise repeatedly when discussing software engineering.

  
  
• 2. 4/8/97, Design Fundamentals
  
  
  • Parnas, D.L., On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Communications of the ACM, 15, 12, pp. 1053-1058 (December 1972).
    A classic and seminal paper laying the foundation for information hiding and data abstraction.

  • Parnas, D.L., Designing software for extension and contraction. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-5, 2, pp. 128-138 (March 1979).
    Another Parnas classic, focusing on the use of layering and on the uses-relation.

  • (*) Bergland, G.D., A guided tour of program design methodologies. IEEE Computer 14, 10, pp. 13-37 (October 1981).
    A broad paper putting some classic design issues (coupling, cohesion, etc.) and classic design techniques (functional decomposition, Jackson System Design, etc.) into some context.

• 3. 4/15/97, Modern Issues in Design and Architecture
  
  (*) You can select any one of the following three topics to read.
  • Either of the following two on-line reports:
    • Foil for the Workshop on Open Implementation, Gregor Kiczales, editor.
    • Beyond the Black Box: Open Implementation Gregor Kiczales.
    Both lay out some basics flaws with the conventional notion of black box information hiding. The first has more detail, but the second lays out the basic ideas.

  • Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R., and Vlissides, J. Design patterns: abstraction and reuse of object-oriented design. ECOOP '93 -- Object-Oriented Programming, pp. 406-31 (July 1993).
    The original paper in design patterns, one of the most influential ideas in design in the last 10 years. I think of patterns as micro-architecture (compared to the next paper).

  • Garlan, D. and Shaw, M., An introduction to software architecture. Advances in software engineering and knowledge engineering, pp. 1-39. World Scientific (1993).
    The foundational paper in the growing discipline of software architecture. It draws some distinctions to design and lays out some benefits and challenges in the area.

• 4. 4/22/97, Software evolution, reverse and re-engineering
  
  
  • (*) Parnas, D.L. Software aging. 16th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 279-87 (May 1994).
    Puts much of the seminal ideas of Belady and Lehman into an understandable, well-written, and well-edited paper.

  • Chikofsky, E. and Cross, J.H. Reverse engineering and design recovery: a taxonomy. IEEE Software, pp. 13-17 (January 1990).
    Not much technical here, but it lays out some terminology and is pretty brief.

  • Mueller, H.A., Orgun, M.A., Tilley, S.R., and Uhl, J.S. A reverse engineering approach to subsystem structure identification. Journal of Software Maintenance 5,4, pp. 181-204 (December 1993).
    A basic overview of Rigi, a graphical approach to supporting reverse engineering.

  • Murphy, G.C., Notkin, D. and Sullivan, K. Software reflexion models: bridging the gap between source and high-level models. Third ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 18-28 (October 1995).
    A way to exploit high-level, largely informal descriptions of systems without compromising a connection to the source.

• 5. 4/29/97, Software evolution, reverse and re-engineering
  
  
  • Griswold, W.G. and Atkinson, D.C. Managing design tradeoffs for a program understanding and transformation tool. Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier, vol. 30, no. 1-2, pp. 99-116 (July-August 1995).
    Captures tradeoffs between rich semantic approaches and simpler, less precise, approaches, both for the user and the tool builder.

  • O'Callahan, R. and Jackson, D. Lackwit: A program understanding tool based on type inference. To appear, International Conference on Software Engineering 1997.
    Exploits type inferencing to aid in program understanding and to identify likely mistakes in programs.

  • (*) Evans, D., Guttag, J., Horning, J. and Tan, Y.M. LCLint: A tool for using specifications to check code. Second ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 87-96 (December 1994).
    Incremental approach to identifying discrepancies between a software specification and its implementation.

• 6. 5/6/97, Requirements specification I
  
  
  • (*) Wing, J.M. A specifier's introduction to formal methods. IEEE Computer (September 1990).
    Lays out the basic reasons why someone might be interested in formal specification; also includes some basic information on some comment notations and approaches.

  • (*) Spivey, M. Introductory material on Z.
    A simple example of the Z specification method.

  • Clarke, E.M and Wing, J.M. Formal methods: State of the Art and Future Directions. ACM Computing Surveys (December 1996).
    A nice and quite extensive survey of the state of the art, for them's that are interested.

• 7. 5/13/97, Requirements specification II
  
• 8. 5/27/97, Quality assurance and testing I
  
  • (*) Beizer, B. Cleanroom Process Model: A Critical Examination. IEEE Software (March/April 1997).
    A powerful and critical, but brief, examination of Cleanroom's claims.

  • Adrion, W.R., Branstad, M.A., Cherniavsky, J.C. Validation, Verification, and Testing of Computer Software. ACM Computing Surveys (June 1982).
    An old (and dated) survey, but still has some useful information for people without much background in testing..

  • Ferguson, P., Humphrey, W.S., Khajenoori, S., Macke, S., Matvya, A. Results of Applying the Personal Software Process. IEEE Computer (May 1997).
    A classic example of an article arguing for a particular style of process.

  • Rahardjc, C.P. A Comparative Evaluation of the Capability Maturity Model and ISO 9000
    A reasonably nice and brief article on these models.

• 9. 6/3/97,