Engineer Your Software! (Synthesis Lectures on Algorithms and Software in Engineering)

Software development is hard, but creating good software is even harder, especially if your main job is something other than developing software. Engineer Your Software! opens the world of software engineering, weaving engineering techniques and measurement into software development activities. Focusing on architecture and design, Engineer Your Software! claims that no matter how you write software, design and engineering matter and can be applied at any point in the process. Engineer Your Software! provides advice, patterns, design criteria, measures, and techniques that will help you get it right the first time. Engineer Your Software! also provides solutions to many vexing issues that developers run into time and time again. Developed over 40 years of creating large software applications, these lessons are sprinkled with real-world examples from actual software projects. Along the way, the author describes common design principles and design patterns that can make life a lot easierfor anyone tasked with writing anything from a simple script to the largest enterprise-scale systems.

Scott A. Whitmire has been engineering and building applications of all sizes, from simple scripts to enterprise-scale applications that run multibillion dollar firms, for over 40 years. During that time, he has encountered many situations in which he had to know that the design was going to work before he was able to build and test it. Sometimes, this was due to a time crunch; sometimes, he just didn’t want to spend the effort and have it fail. These situations led him to develop the practice of using well-known design criteria to evaluate design options during the design process. Many of these design criteria did not have suitable measures that would make them useful, so he invented them, along with a way to mathematically analyze the dynamic behavior of a design before there is code to test. The result is the software equivalent of structural analysis in civil engineering. Mr. Whitmire holds a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting and a Master of Software Engineering. He has written extensively on software engineering, system architecture, and business architecture, and has trained and mentored many engineers and architects. In addition to many presentations, articles, book chapters, and blog posts, he wrote Object-Oriented Design Measurement in 1997. His current day job is to design, build, and operate the software tools used by the Mathematical Neuro-Oncology Lab at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona, which looks and behaves like a $4M startup