Software Engineering Essentials, Volume I

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING ESSENTIALS Volume I: The Development Process FOURTH EDITION A multi- text software engineering course or courses (based on the 2013 IEEE SWEBOK) for undergraduate and graduate university students A self-teaching IEEE CSDP/CADA certificate exam training course based on the Computer Society’s CSDP exam specifications These software engineering books serves two separate but connected audiences and roles: 1. Software engineers who wish to study for and pass either or both of the IEEE Computer Society's software engineering certification exams. The Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) and is awarded to software engineers who have 5 to 7 years of software development experience and pass the CSDP exam. This certification was instituted in 2001 and establishes that the certificate holder is a competent software engineer in most areas of software engineering such as: • Software project manager • Software developer • Software configuration manager • Software quality-assurance expert • Software test lead • And so forth The other certificate is for recent software engineering graduates or self-taught software engineers and is designated Certified Software Development Associate (CDSA). The CSDA also requires passing an exam, but does not require any professional experience. 2. University students who are taking (or reading) a BS or MS degree in software engineering, or practicing software engineers who want to update their knowledge. This book was written as a guide to help software engineers take and pass the IEEE CSDP exam. However several reviewers commented that this book would also make a good university text book for a undergraduate or graduate course in software engineering. So the original books were modified to be applicable to both tasks. The SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) is a major milestone in the development and publicity of software engineering technology. However it needs to be noted that SWEBOK was NOT developed as a software engineering tutorial or textbook. The SWEBOK is intended to catalog software engineering concepts, not teach them. The new, three-volume, fourth edition, Software Engineering Essentials, by Drs. Richard Hall Thayer and Merlin Dorfman attempts to fill this void (you are now reading Volume I). This new software engineering text expands on and replaces the earlier two-volume, third-edition, Software Engineering books which was also written by Thayer and Dorfman and published by the IEEE Computer Society Press [2006]. These new Volumes I and II offer a complete and detailed overview of software engineering as defined in IEEE SWEBOK 2013. These books provide a thorough analysis of software development in requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, and maintenance, plus the supporting processes of configuration management, quality assurance, verification and validation, and reviews and audits. To keep up with evolution of the software industry (as expressed through evolution of the SWEBOK Guide, CSDP/CSDA, and the curriculum guidelines) a third volume in the Soft-ware Engineering series is needed. This third volume contains: • Software Engineering Measurements • Software Engineering Economics • Computer Foundations • Mathematics Foundations • Engineering Foundations This three-volume, Software Engineering Essentials series, provides an overview snapshot of the software state of the practice in a form that is a lot easier to digest than the SWEBOK Guide. The three-volume set is also a valuable reference (useful well beyond undergraduate and graduate software engineering university programs) that provides a concise survey of the depth and breadth of software engineering. These new KAs exist so that software engineers can demonstrate a mastery of scientific technology and engineering. This is in answer to the criticism of software engineering that it does not contain enough engineering to qualify it as an engineering discipline.

Richard Hall Thayer, PhD, CSDP, visited all six continents as a consultant and lecturer in software engineering, project management, and software engineering standards. In the summers, he was a visiting lecturer and senior researcher at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland, and he recently visited China where he lectured on the new IEEE professional software engineering certificate.

Dr. Thayer received a BSEE degree and an MS degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Barbara in Electrical Engineering. He is an Emeritus Professor of Software Engineering at Sacramento State University and before that was a senior officer in the U.S. Air Force. He spent four years directing the U.S. Air Force R&D program in computer science. Dr. Thayer is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core, and a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP), Standards Committee. He is the author of 16 books  on software engineering.

Merlin Dorfman PhD, PE, retired in September 2009 from Cisco Systems in San Jose, CA. He had been a member of the Network Management Technology Group (NMTG) Quality Team and also worked with the team developing the next-generation product development process. Merlin previously retired in 1997 from Lockheed Martin Corp. in Sunnyvale, CA. He specialized in systems engineering for software-intensive systems (requirements analysis, top-level architecture, and performance evaluation), in software process improvement, and in algorithm development for data processing systems.

Dr. Dorfman has a BS and MS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD from Stanford University, all in Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the states of California and Colorado, and is a member of the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Gamma Tau honorary societies. Dr. Dorfman is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), winner of its Aerospace Software Engineering Award for 1999. He is an affiliate member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society. He is also a Program Evaluator for Aerospace Engineering program accreditation through the AIAA and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). He is co-author or co-editor of several books on software engineering, requirements engineering, and system engineering for IEEE and AIAA.