Foreword

Over ten years ago, I read about a software engineering course taught by Bernd Bruegge at Carnegie-Mellon University. In software engineering courses at many other universities, small groups of 3 or 4 students were assigned several toy problems during a semester with deadlines of less than a month. On such small projects, one strong programmer can carry the whole team by brute force. It isn’t necessary to learn communication skills, use modeling tools, or deal with the ambiguities of actual problems. Students come away unprepared for the complexities of real-world development. In Bruegge’s course, the entire class worked on a single, semester-long project to produce a query-oriented navigation system for the city of Pittsburgh. They had to build on the interactive mapping system produced by the previous semester’s class. The clients were managers for the county planning department and port authority. The geographic and bus schedule data had misspellings, inaccuracies, and format incompatibles. The students produced an accepted system of over 27,000 lines of code. What a difference from the toy projects taught at many other places! Students came away from the course with an appreciation of the need for strategy, organization, and tools to deal with the complexity and messiness of the real world. They learned software engineering the only way one learns any craft—by practicing it on realistic cases.

This book is a reflection of that pragmatic philosophy of software development as an engineering discipline. The authors adopt a point of view—an object-oriented approach using UML—that makes the many facets of software engineering approachable to students. They cover both the modeling techniques and the human communications skills needed to achieve success. They also include several chapters on managing change, a topic that appears in every real project but which is often neglected in texts. Readers of this book will gain a solid appreciation of the rich scope and complexity of software engineering.

I particularly enjoyed the many illuminating anecdotes selected from a wide range of fields. These provide lively examples of problems large and small that illustrate the subtleties and traps that engineers must confront. Any book that makes relevant examples of Polynesian navigation, the tangled history of the text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and grandmother’s recipe for trimming hams is not only useful but also fun to read.

Jim Rumbaugh