The Essentials of Modern Software Engineering: Free the Practices from the Method Prisons! (Acm Books)

The first course in software engineering is the most critical. Education must start from an understanding of the heart of software development, from familiar ground that is common to all software development endeavors. This book is an in-depth introduction to software engineering that uses a systematic, universal kernel to teach the essential elements of all software engineering methods. This kernel, Essence, is a vocabulary for defining methods and practices. Essence was envisioned and originally created by Ivar Jacobson and his colleagues, developed by Software Engineering Method and Theory (SEMAT) and approved by The Object Management Group (OMG) as a standard in 2014. Essence is a practice-independent framework for thinking and reasoning about the practices we have and the practices we need. Essence establishes a shared and standard understanding of what is at the heart of software development. Essence is agnostic to any particular method, lifecycle independent, programming language independent, concise, scalable, extensible, and formally specified. Essence frees the practices from their method prisons. The first part of the book describes Essence, the essential elements to work with, the essential things to do and the essential competencies you need when developing software. The other three parts describe more and more advanced use cases of Essence. Using real but manageable examples, it covers the fundamentals of Essence and the innovative use of serious games to support software engineering. It also explains how current practices such as user stories, use cases, Scrum, and micro-services can be described using Essence, and illustrates how their activities can be represented using the Essence notions of cards and checklists. The fourth part of the book offers a vision how Essence can be scaled to support large, complex systems engineering. Essence is supported by an ecosystem developed and maintained by a community of experienced people worldwide. From this ecosystem, professors and students can select what they need and create their own way of working, thus learning how to create ONE way of working that matches the particular situation and needs. -- Provided by publisher Contents Foreword by Ian Sommerville Foreword by Grady Booch Preface PART I. THE ESSENCE OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING 1. From Programming to Software Engineering 2. Software Engineering Methods and Practices 3. Essence in a Nutshell 4. Identifying the Key Elements of Software Engineering 5. The Language of Software Engineering 6. The Kernel of Software Engineering 7. Reflection on Theory 8. Applying Essence in the Small—Playing Serious Games PART II. DEVELOPING SOFTWARE WITH ESSENCE 9. Kick-Starting Development Using Essence 10. Developing with Essence 11. The Development Journey 12. Reflection on the Kernel PART III. SMALL-SCALE DEVELOPMENT WITH PRACTICES 13. Kick-Starting Development with Practices 14. Running with Scrum 15. Running with User Story Lite 16. Running with Use Case Lite 17. Running with Microservices 18. Putting the Practices Together: Composition PART IV. LARGE-SCALE COMPLEX DEVELOPMENT 19. What It Means to Scale 20. Essentializing Practices 21. Scaling Up to Large and Complex Development 22. Reaching Out to Different Kinds of Development 23. Reaching Out to the Future Appendix A. A Brief History of Software and Software Engineering References Index Author Biographies