Books and Readings

There is one required text:

Hans van Vliet, (2000) “Software Engineering: Principles and Practice”, 2nd edition, John Wiley & Sons, .

Note that this book is new this year. In previous years, we used Blum's book, “Software Engineering: A Holistic View”. Blum's book is now getting a little dated, and students regularly complained that they didn't like it. If you happen to pick up a used copy of Blum, feel free to use it, but be aware that it doesn't (adequately) cover some important topics (e.g. Software Architectures, Process Modeling, and Formal Methods)

Other recommended texts:

Babara Liskov and John Guttag, “Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification and Object Oriented Design”. Addison Wesley. Note: Although this book is geared towards Java, it is the best book on program design ever. Some of the material for the course was adapted from this book.
Mary Shaw and David Garlan, “Software Architectures: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline”. Prentice Hall. The first ever book on software architectures. Although a little dated now, it makes excellent reading.

Also:

You should also read some of the newsgroup comp.risks

In previous years, we provided a collected readings for CSC444F. This was used mainly to supplement Blum's book, but also to provide immediate access to some of the classic papers in software engineering. However, van Vliet surveys much of this material, and you probably have enough to read already. However, if you're really energetic, you can probably obtain a copy of this collection from previous year's students, of find the original papers on the web. The collection contained the following papers:

Brooks, Fred. “No Silver Bullet”. IEEE Computer 20(4), April 1987.
Wasserman, Anthony “Toward a Discipline of Software Engineering”. IEEE Software 13(6), November 1996.
Lehman, Meir M. “Programs, Life Cycles and the Laws of Software Evolution”. Proceedings of the IEEE, 68(9) September 1990.
Humphrey, Watts “A Software Maturity Framework”. Chapter 1 of "Managing the Software Process". Addison-Wesley, 1989.
Fichman, Robert G. & Kemerer, Chris F. “Object Oriented and Conventional Analysis and Design Methodologies: Comparison and Critique”. IEEE Computer 25(10), October 1992.
Parnas, David “On the Criteria to be used in Decomposing Systems Into Modules”. Communications of the ACM 15(12), December 1972.
Lampson, Butler “Hints for Computer System Design” IEEE Software, 1(1), January 1984.
Shaw, Mary & Garlan, David. “Architectural Styles”. Chapter 2 of “Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline”. Prentice Hall, 1996.
Wing, Jeanette M. “A Specifier’s Introduction to Formal Methods”. IEEE Computer 23(9), September 1990.
Ackerman, A. Frank “Software Inspections and the Cost Effective Production of Reliable Software”. In Merlin Dorfman and Richard Thayer (eds.) “Software Engineering” IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.
Liskov, Barbara & Guttag, J. “Testing and Debugging”. Chapter 9 of “Abstraction and Specification in Program Development”. MIT Press, 1986.
Leveson, Nancy “Computers and Risk”. Chapter 2 of “Safeware: System Safety and Computers”, Addison-Wesley, 1995.

Background Reading:

General Software Engineering Texts

van Vliet's book is the best general software engineering text I have seen, and Pfleeger is the second best. Two other commonly used textbooks are listed here. I find these all too shallow for my liking, but others may find them useful.

Shari Pfleeger, “Software Engineering: Theory and Practice”. Prentice Hall.
Roger Pressman, (1987) Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach (3rd Edition). McGraw-Hill.
Ian Sommerville (1995) Software Engineering (5th Edition). Addison Wesley.

There is also an IEEE collection of readings. However, it is expensive, and the quality of the papers included is variable. The collection of papers I put together for previous years of this course is much more useful(!):

Merlin Dorfman and Richard Thayer (eds.) “Software Engineering” IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

Program Design

These two are wonderful books on how to program properly. L & G covers the theoretical issues more comprehensively. B & L has more detailed case study material:

Babara Liskov and John Guttag, (2000) “Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification and Object Oriented Design”. Addison Wesley
Berzins, V. and Luqi (1991) Software Engineering with Abstractions. Addison Wesley.

One other useful book if you feel you are weak on programming is:

Bornat, R. (1987) Programming from First Principles. Prentice Hall.

You'll also (probably) need a reference book for the programming language you are using, but I assume you still have one around from when you first learnt to program.

Software Verification and Validation

Boris Beizer, Software Testing Techniques, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990.
William C. Hetzel, The Complete Guide to Software Testing, Second edition, QED Information Services INC, 1988.
Bryan, W. L. and Siegal, S. G. (1988) Software Product Assurance: Techniques for Reducing Software Risk. Elsevier.
Schulmeyer G. C. and McManus, J. I. (1992) Handbook of Software Quality Assurance (Second Edition). Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Freedman, D. P. and Weinberg, G. M. (1990) Handbook of Walkthroughs, Inspections and Technical Reviews: Evaluating Programs, Projects and Products. Dorset House Publishing.

See also the testing handout produced by Prof. Horton: postscript, or pdf

Software Requirements Engineering

Davis, A. M. “Software Requirements: analysis and specification”. Prentice Hall, 1990.
Roberston, S. and Robertson J. “Mastering the Requirements Process”. Addison-Wesley, 1999
Graham, I. “Requirements Engineering and Rapid Development: A Rigorous, Object-Oriented Approach”. Addison-Wesley, 1998.
Gause, D. C. and Weinberg, G. M. “Exploring Requirements: quality before design”. Dorset House, 1989.
Jackson, M. “Software Requirements and Specifications: A Lexicon of Practice, Principles and Prejudices”, Addison-Wesley, 1995.

The first three are textbooks, offering the best coverage of the field. The other two are more general reading, but very worthwhile to get a feel for why requirements engineering is considered the hardest part of software engineering. All these books are worth dipping into.

Software Design

Budgen, D. (1994) Software Design. Addison-Wesley.
Shaw, M. & Garlan, D. “Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline”. Prentice Hall, 1996.

Budgen is an excellent introduction to the general problems of software design, including design representations, design quality, and so on. Shaw and Garlan's book was the first book to describe the emerging field of software architectural design. I've included chapter 2 of this in the collected reading for the course.

Formal Methods

If you need to brush up on your logic, and also get to grips with how it is used in software verification, there is no book better than:

Huth, M. and Ryan, M. "Logic in Computer Science: Modelling and Reasoning about Systems". Cambridge University Press. 1999.

Another good introduction is:

Heitmeyer, C. and Mandrioli, D. “Formal Methods for Real-time Computing” Wiley, 1996.

Managing the Software Process

These are all good background texts for understanding the broader picture.

Glass, R. L. (1988) Software Communication Skills. Prentice Hall.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., (1978) The Mythical Man-Month. Addison Wesley.
W. S. Humphrey, (1989) Managing the Software Process. Addison-Wesley.
W. E. Deming, (1982) Out of the Crisis. MIT Press.
Lee. L. (1992) The Day the Phones Stopped: how people get hurt when computers go wrong. Primus.