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The lists in this article may contain items that are not notable, encyclopedic, or helpful. Please help out by removing such elements and incorporating appropriate items into the main body of the article. (January 2008) |
This list complements the software engineering article, giving more details and examples.
For an alphabetical listing of topics, please see List of software engineering topics (alphabetical).
Technologies and practices
Skilled software engineers use technologies and practices from a variety of fields to improve their productivity in creating software and to improve the quality of the delivered product.
Software engineering topics
Many technologies and practices are (mostly) confined to software engineering, though many of these are shared with computer science.
Programming languages
- List of programming languages
- Scripting language
- Assembly programming language
- Ada
- APL
- COBOL
- Pascal
- C
- C++
- C#
- Clojure
- Common Lisp
- D
- ColdFusion
- Delphi
- Dylan
- Eiffel
- Erlang
- Fortran
- F#
- Groovy
- Java
- Lasso
- ML
- OCaml
- Perl
- PHP
- PL/SQL
- Prolog
- Haskell
- Python
- Ruby
- Scheme
- Smalltalk
- Tcl
- T-SQL
- Visual Basic
- Visual Basic .NET
- Verilog
- VHDL
Programming paradigm, based on a programming language technology
- Aspect-oriented programming
- Functional decomposition
- Object-oriented programming
- Post-object programming
- Structured programming
- Rule-based programming
Databases
Graphical user interfaces
Programming tools
- Configuration management and source code management
- Build tools
- Editors
- Parser creation tools
Libraries
Design languages
Patterns, document many common programming and project management techniques
Processes and methodologies
- Agile
- Heavyweight
- Process Models
Platforms
A platform combines computer hardware and an operating system. As platforms grow more powerful and less costly, applications and tools grow more widely available.
- BREW
- Cray supercomputers
- DEC minicomputers
- IBM mainframes
- Linux PCs
- Mac OS and Mac OS X PCs
- Microsoft .NET network software platform
- Palm PDAs
- Sun Microsystems Solaris
- Windows PCs (Wintel)
- Symbian OS
Other Practices
- Communication
- Method engineering
- Pair programming
- Performance Engineering
- Programming productivity
- Refactoring
- Software inspections/Code reviews
- Software reuse
- Systems integration
- Teamwork
Other tools
Computer science topics
Skilled software engineers know a lot of computer science including what is possible and impossible, and what is easy and hard for software.
- Algorithms, well-defined methods for solving specific problems.
- Compiler theory
- Data structures, well-defined methods for storing and retrieving data.
- Computability, some problems cannot be solved at all
- Complexity, some problems are solvable in principle, yet unsolvable in practice
- Formal methods
- Adaptive Systems
Mathematics topics
Discrete mathematics is a key foundation of software engineering.
- Number representation
- Set (computer science)
- Bags
- Graphs
- Logic
- Induction
- Combinatorics
Other
Life cycle phases
- Development life cycle phase
- Requirements gathering / analysis
- Software architecture
- Computer programming
- Testing, detects bugs
- Quality assurance, ensures compliance with process.
- Product Life cycle phase and Project lifecycle
- Inception
- First development
- Major release
- Minor release
- Bug fix release
- Maintenance
- Obsolescence
- Release development stage, near the end of a release cycle
- Alpha
- Beta
- Gold master
- 1.0; 2.0
- Software development lifecycle
Deliverables
Deliverables must be developed for many SE projects. Software engineers rarely make all of these deliverables themselves. They usually cooperate with the writers, trainers, installers, marketers, technical support people, and others who make many of these deliverables.
- Application software — the software
- Database — schemas and data.
- Documentation, online and/or print, FAQ, Readme, release notes, Help, for each role
- Administration and Maintenance policy, what should be backed-up, checked, configured, ...
- Installers
- Migration
- Upgrade from previous installations
- Upgrade from competitor's installations
- Training materials, for each role
- Support info for computer support groups.
- Marketing and sales materials
- White papers, explain the technologies used in the applications
- Comparisons with competitor products
Business roles
- Operations
- Development
- Business
- Academe
Management topics
- Leadership
- Coaching
- Communication
- Listening
- Motivation
- Vision, SEs are good at this
- Example, everyone follows a good example best
- Human resource management
- Hiring, getting people into an organization
- Staffing, getting people onto a project
- Training
- Evaluation
- Project management
- Goal setting
- Customer interaction (Rethink)
- Estimation
- Risk management
- Change management
- Process management
Business topics
- Quality programs
Community topics
Pioneers
Many people made important contributions to SE technologies, practices, or applications.
- John Backus: Fortran, first optimizing compiler, BNF
- Vic Basili: Experience factory.
- F.L. Bauer: Stack principle, popularized the term Software Engineering
- Kent Beck: Refactoring, extreme programming, pair programming, test-driven development.
- Tim Berners-Lee: World wide web
- Barry Boehm: SE economics, COCOMO, Spiral model.
- Grady Booch: Object-oriented design, UML.
- Fred Brooks: Managed System 360 and OS 360. Wrote The Mythical Man-Month and No Silver Bullet.
- Larry Constantine: Structured design, coupling, cohesion
- Edsger Dijkstra: Wrote Notes on Structured Programming, A Discipline of Programming and Go To Statement Considered Harmful, algorithms, formal methods, pedagogy.
- Michael Fagan: Software inspection.
- Tom Gilb: Software metric, Software inspection, Evolutionary processes.
- Grace Hopper: The first compiler (Mark 1), COBOL, Nanoseconds.
- Watts Humphrey: Capability Maturity Model, Personal Software Process, fellow of the Software Engineering Institute.
- Jean Ichbiah: Ada
- Michael A. Jackson: Jackson Structured Programming, Jackson System Development
- Bill Joy: Berkeley Unix, vi, Java.
- Brian Kernighan: C and Unix.
- Donald Knuth: Wrote The Art of Computer Programming, TeX, algorithms, literate programming
- Bertrand Meyer: Design by Contract, Eiffel programming language.
- Peter G. Neumann: RISKS Digest, ACM Sigsoft.
- David Parnas: Module design, social responsibility, professionalism.
- Jef Raskin: Developed the original Macintosh GUI
- Dennis Ritchie: C and Unix.
- Winston W. Royce: Waterfall model.
- Mary Shaw: Software architecture.
- Richard Stallman: Founder of the Free Software Foundation
- Linus Torvalds: Linux kernel, free software / open source development.
- Will Tracz: Reuse, ACM Software Engineering Notes.
- Gerald Weinberg: Wrote The Psychology of Computer Programming.
- Jeanette Wing: Formal specifications.
- Ed Yourdon: Structured programming, wrote The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
See also
- List of programmers
- List of computer scientists
- List of software moguls
Notable publications
- About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper, about user interface design. ISBN 0-7645-2641-3
- The Capability Maturity Model by Watts Humphrey. Written for the Software Engineering Institute, emphasizing management and process. (See Managing the Software Process ISBN 0-201-18095-2)
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond about open source development.
- The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer by Ed Yourdon predicts the end of software development in the U.S. ISBN 0-13-191958-X
- Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. ISBN 0-201-63361-2
- Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck ISBN 0-321-27865-8
- "Go To Statement Considered Harmful" by Edsger Dijkstra.
- Internet, Innovation and Open Source:Actors in the Network — First Monday article by Ilkka Tuomi (2000) source
- The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, about project management. ISBN 0-201-83595-9
- Object-oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch. ISBN 0-8053-5340-2
- Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. ISBN 0-932633-43-9
- The pragmatic engineer versus the scientific designer by E. W. Dijkstra [1]
- Principles of Software Engineering Management by Tom Gilb about evolutionary processes. ISBN 0-201-19246-2
- The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. Written as an independent consultant, partly about his years at IBM. ISBN 0-932633-42-0
- Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts. ISBN 0-201-48567-2
- The Pragmatic Programmer: from journeyman to master by Andrew Hunt, and David Thomas. ISBN 0-201-61622-X
See also:
Professional topics
- Software engineering demographics
- Software engineering economics
- CCSE
- History of software engineering
- Software engineering professionalism
- Legal
Influence on society
Software engineers affect society by creating applications. These applications produce value for users, and sometimes produce disasters.
Applications
Software engineers build software (applications, operating systems, system software) that people use.
Applications influence software engineering by pressuring developers to solve problems in new ways. For example, consumer software emphasizes low cost, medical software emphasizes high quality, and Internet commerce software emphasizes rapid development.
- Business software
- Analytics
- Data mining closely related to database
- Decision support systems
- Airline reservations
- Banking
- Commerce
- Trade
- Auctions (eg. EBay)
- Reverse auctions (procurment)
- Bar code scanners
- Compilers
- Communication
- Instant messengers
- VOIP
- Calendars — scheduling and coordinating
- Contact managers
- Computer graphics
- Animation
- Special effects for video and film
- Editing
- Post-processing
- Cryptography
- Databases, support almost every field
- Embedded systems Both software engineers and traditional engineers write software control systems for embedded products.
- Engineering All traditional engineering branches use software extensively. Engineers use spreadsheets, more than they ever used calculators. Engineers use custom software tools to design, analyze, and simulate their own projects, like bridges and power lines. These projects resemble software in many respects, because the work exists as electronic documents and goes through analysis, design, implementation, and testing phases. Software tools for engineers use the tenets of computer science; as well as the tenets of calculus, physics, and chemistry.
- File
- Finance
- Games
- Information systems, support almost every field
- Logistics
- Manufacturing
- Music
- Music sequencers
- Sound effects
- Music synthesis
- Network Management
- Network management system
- Element Management System
- Operations Support System
- Business Support Systems
- Networks and Internet
- Office suites
- Operating systems
- Robotics
- Signal processing, encoding and interpreting signals
- Image processing, encoding and interpreting visual information
- Speech processing
- Text recognition
- Handwriting recognition
- Simulation, supports almost every field.
- Engineering, A software simulation can be cheaper to build and more flexible to change than a physical engineering model.
- Sciences
- Sciences
- Traffic Control
- Training
- Drill
- Simulation
- Testing
- Visualization, supports almost every field
- Voting
- World wide web
Disasters
Software has played a role in many high-profile disasters.
- Ariane 5 Flight 501
- Mars probe
- Denver International Airport
- TAURUS — UK share settlement system and dematerialised central share depository.
- Therac-25 — A radiation therapy machine responsible for six overdoses due to faulty software.
- Airbus A320 —[citation needed] The Airbus A320, while was controversial in software engineering circles, being the first civilian Fly-by-wire aircraft. In the Airbus flight control systems, the computer has the final say on all decisions, meaning the safety of passengers depends upon the accuracy of the software specification, and the competence of the engineering teams producing the (multiple, independent) software stacks. The Strasbourg A320 crash of Jan 21, 1992 is partially related to software in that poor user interface design was a contributing factor.
- Failure at Dharan — Patriot Missile clock issue.
Other terms
Related fields
- Information technology
- Traditional engineering
- Software engineering
- Arts and Sciences
- Application software
- Programming
Different languages
- In Arabic , software engineering is called handast albrmjeyat (هندسة البرمجيات).
- In Catalan, software engineering is called enginyeria del software.
- In Chinese, software engineering is called ruǎnjiàn gōngchéng(软件工程 软件工程)
- In Danish, software engineering is called Software ingeniør.
- In French, software engineering is called Génie logiciel.
- In Persian, software engineering is called مهندسی نرمافزار.
- In German, software engineering is called Softwaretechnik.
- In Hebrew, software engineering is called הנדסת תוכנה.
- In Icelandic, software engineering is called Hugbúnaðarverkfræði.
- In Italian, software engineering is called Ingegneria del software,
- In Korean, software engineering is called 소프트웨어 공학,
- In Norwegian, software engineering is called Programvareutvikling.
- In Polish, software engineering is called Inżynieria oprogramowania.
- In Portuguese, software engineering is called Engenharia de software,
- In Spanish, software engineering is called Ingeniería del software,
- In Turkish, software engineering is called yazılım mühendisliği.
- In Greek, software engineering is called τεχνολογία λογισμικού.
Miscellaneous
- Complexity or scaling
- Software brittleness problem
- Second system syndrome
- optimization
- Source code escrow
- Feature interaction problem
- Certification (software engineering)
See also
- List of basic software engineering topics
- SWEBOK Software engineering body of knowledge
- CCSE Computing curriculum for software engineering
- Computer terms etymology, the origins of computer terms
External links
- Professional organizations:
- Professionalism
- Education
- Standards:
- Government organizations:
- Agile:
- Other organizations:
- Demographics
- Surveys:
- Other:
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