Читать книгу Beginning Software Engineering - Stephens Rod - Страница 5

This book is divided into two parts. The first part describes the basic tasks you need to complete and deliver useful software. Things such as design, programming, and testing. The book's second part describes some common software development models that use different techniques to perform those tasks.

Before you can begin to work on a software development project, however, you need to do some preparation. You need to set up tools and techniques that help you track your progress throughout the project. Chapter 1, “Software Engineering from 20,000 Feet,” describes these “before-the-beginning” activities.

After you have the preliminaries in place, there are many approaches you can take to produce software. All those approaches have the same goal (making useful software), so they must handle roughly the same tasks. These are things such as gathering requirements, building a plan, and actually writing the code. The first part of this book describes these tasks. Chapter 1 explains those tasks at a high level. Chapters 2 through 11 provide additional details about what these tasks are and how you can accomplish them effectively.

The second part of the book describes some of the more popular software development approaches. All these models address the same issues described in the earlier chapters but in different ways. Some focus on predictability so that you know exactly what features will be provided and when. Others focus on creating the most features as quickly as possible, even if that means straying from the original design. Chapters 12 through 14 describe some of the most popular of these development models.

That's the basic path this book gives you for learning software engineering. First learn the tasks you need to complete to deliver useful software. Then learn how different models handle those tasks.

However, many people have trouble learning by slogging through a tedious enumeration of facts. (I certainly do!) To make the information a bit easier to absorb, this book includes a few other elements.

Each chapter ends with exercises that you can use to see if you were paying attention while you read the chapter. I don't like exercises that merely ask you to repeat what is in the chapter. (Quick, what are some advantages and disadvantages of the ethereal nature of software?) Most of the exercises ask you to expand on the chapter's main ideas. Hopefully, they'll make you think about new ways to use what's explained in the chapter.

Sometimes, the exercises are the only way I could sneak some more information into the chapter that didn't quite fit in any of its sections. In those cases, the questions and answers provided in Appendix A are like extended digressions and thought experiments than quiz questions.

I strongly recommend that you at least skim the exercises and think about them. Then ask yourself if you understand the solutions. All the solutions are included in Appendix A, “Solutions to Exercises.”