A Concise Introduction to Software Engineering (Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science)

From the reviews: "This book's title provides an excellent description of its content. ... This compact volume is organized into eight well-focused chapters containing numerous examples and well-designed self-test exercises. Includes an excellent collection of references and a very useful index. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate through professional readers; two-year technical program students." (J. Beidler, Choice, Vol. 46 (6), February, 2009) "Jalote's intention in this book is to present just enough material to teach beginning software engineers what they need to know to do a development project that carries a small product from conception through delivery. The result is a short book ... making this sort of book very attractive as a text for introductory software engineering. ... topics are well chosen and their discussion is good." (Christopher Fox, ACM Computing Reviews, November, 2008)

An introductory course on Software Engineering remains one of the hardest subjects to teach largely because of the wide range of topics the area enc- passes. I have believed for some time that we often tend to teach too many concepts and topics in an introductory course resulting in shallow knowledge and little insight on application of these concepts. And Software Engineering is ?nally about application of concepts to e?ciently engineer good software solutions. Goals I believe that an introductory course on Software Engineering should focus on imparting to students the knowledge and skills that are needed to successfully execute a commercial project of a few person-months e?ort while employing proper practices and techniques. It is worth pointing out that a vast majority of the projects executed in the industry today fall in this scope―executed by a small team over a few months. I also believe that by carefully selecting the concepts and topics, we can, in the course of a semester, achieve this. This is the motivation of this book. The goal of this book is to introduce to the students a limited number of concepts and practices which will achieve the following two objectives: – Teach the student the skills needed to execute a smallish commercial project.