Classification of software engineering disciplines

The software engineering disciplines fixed in the international program Curricula-2004 are analyzed. A new classification is given that includes the basic disciplines of this program and its new disciplines that reflect important scientific, engineering, managerial, economic, production, and educational aspects of the software industry. The structure, contents, basic concepts, and destination of each of these disciplines and their roles in industrial production of software products are considered. The new disciplines are proposed to be included into the program Curricula-2010. Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 6, pp. 3–9, November–December 2008.     

营造个体软件工程规程

软件产品的开发都是由个体软件工程师完成的,因此能否具有有效的个体软件工程规程会直接影响到产品开发的效率、费用和最终产品的质量。文章从自我意识、过程规程和开发规程三个层次描述了个体软件工程规程应该包含的基本内容,给出了构建个体软件工程规程的基本步骤,并进一步讨论了个体软件开发过程中的工具支持、个体软件工程规程同软件企业能力成熟度之间的关系等问题。     

A Preliminary Software Engineering Theory as Investigated by Published Experiments

The investigation of software engineering techniques by using the experiment sets up the discipline of experimental software engineering. The effectiveness and efficiency of software engineering techniques have been studied in experiments and confronted with empirical data. The results of these experiments are published in a diversity of journals and proceeding papers. However, there is not an overview so far which represents the available results systematically. By taking the results from published experiments that deal with analysis, design, implementation, test, maintenance, quality assurance, and reuse techniques a preliminary software engineering theory is developed. From this theory, fruitful problems, suggestions for gathering new data, and entirely new lines of investigation are deduced.     

Research synthesis in software engineering: A tertiary study

Context

Comparing and contrasting evidence from multiple studies is necessary to build knowledge and reach conclusions about the empirical support for a phenomenon. Therefore, research synthesis is at the center of the scientific enterprise in the software engineering discipline.

Objective

The objective of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of the challenges in synthesizing software engineering research and their implications for the progress of research and practice.

Method

A tertiary study of journal articles and full proceedings papers from the inception of evidence-based software engineering was performed to assess the types and methods of research synthesis in systematic reviews in software engineering.

Results

As many as half of the 49 reviews included in the study did not contain any synthesis. Of the studies that did contain synthesis, two thirds performed a narrative or a thematic synthesis. Only a few studies adequately demonstrated a robust, academic approach to research synthesis.

Conclusion

We concluded that, despite the focus on systematic reviews, there is limited attention paid to research synthesis in software engineering. This trend needs to change and a repertoire of synthesis methods needs to be an integral part of systematic reviews to increase their significance and utility for research and practice.     

需求工程的探讨

软件工程被分为需求、设计、实现、测试等几个阶段,其中需求阶段是一个项目的开端,也是项目成功的基石。在软件工程中,需求分析指的是在建立一个新的或改变一个现存的电脑系统时描写新系统的目的、范围、定义和功能时所要做的所有的工作。需求分析是软件工程中的一个关键过程。在这个过程中,系统分析员和软件工程师确定顾客的需要。只有在确定了这些需要后他们才能够分析和寻求新系统的解决方法。在软件工程的历史中,很长时间里人们一直认为需求分析是整个软件工程中最简单的一个步骤,但在过去十年中越来越多的人认识到它是整个过程中最关键的一个过程。假如在需求分析时分析者们未能正确地认识到顾客的需要的话,那么最后的软件实际上不可能达到顾客的需要,或者软件无法在规定的时间里完工。     

Development of Software Engineering: A Research Perspective

In the past 40 years, software engineering has emerged as an important sub-field of computer science and has made significant contribution to the software industry. Now it is gradually becoming a new independent discipline. This paper presents a survey of software engineering development from a research perspective. Firstly, the history of software engineering is reviewed with focus on the driving forces of software technology, the software engineering framework and the milestones of software engineering development. Secondly, after reviewing the past academic efforts, the current research activities are surveyed and new challenges brought by Internet are analyzed. Software engineering researches and activities in China are also reviewed. The work in Peking University is described as a representative.     

Change the face of software engineering education: A field report from Taiwan

Context: In Taiwan, the supply of software engineers provided by universities has suffered from both a quantity problem and a quality problem. An effort to change the software engineering education is in need.Objective: The Software Engineering Consortium (SEC) of Taiwan sets its objective to increase the number of college graduates that are better prepared for filling software development and maintenance jobs.Method: Four dysfunctions: avoidance of process, inattention to modeling, lack of awareness to software quality, and chasm between application domains and software engineering, of the current situation are identified. The effort to correct the dysfunctions involves design of a module-oriented software engineering curriculum, and organization of people, resource, and activities.Results: In the academic years from 2003 to 2008, both the number of software engineering courses offered and the enrollment size increased significantly by a space of some 250 courses and 5000 enrollments, respectively.Conclusion: The SEC effort to establishing software engineering modules has been received with enthusiasm by faculty members and students of the participating institutes. Inspired by the important foundational work such as SWEBOK and SE2004, we believe that the adopted strategy of identifying dysfunctions and then designing remedies to address these dysfunctions contributed significantly to the success of the SEC effort.     

软件测试工程化的研究和实践

软件测试是保证软件产品质量的一种重要手段,软件测试工程化的管理对于提高软件测试效率、保证软件测试质量具有重要的作用.根据工程化管理的思想,分别对软件测试模型、测试人员要求、测试生命周期、软件问题管理和测试辅助工具等软件测试相关要素的工程化要求进行了研究,提出了一种实用有效的软件测试工程化管理方案,并结合一个具体的软件项目,描述了该软件测试工程化管理方案的成功应用情况.     

Toward data mining engineering: A software engineering approach

The number, variety and complexity of projects involving data mining or knowledge discovery in databases activities have increased just lately at such a pace that aspects related to their development process need to be standardized for results to be integrated, reused and interchanged in the future. Data mining projects are quickly becoming engineering projects, and current standard processes, like CRISP-DM, need to be revisited to incorporate this engineering viewpoint. This is the central motivation of this paper that makes the point that experience gained about the software development process over almost 40 years could be reused and integrated to improve data mining processes. Consequently, this paper proposes to reuse ideas and concepts underlying the IEEE Std 1074 and ISO 12207 software engineering model processes to redefine and add to the CRISP-DM process and make it a data mining engineering standard.     

Engaging the net generation with evidence-based software engineering through a community-driven web database

Software engineering faculty face the challenge of educating future researchers and industry practitioners regarding the generation of empirical software engineering studies and their use in evidence-based software engineering. In order to engage the Net generation with this topic, we propose development and population of a community-driven Web database containing summaries of empirical software engineering studies. We also present our experience with integrating these activities into a graduate software engineering course. These efforts resulted in the creation of “SEEDS: Software Engineering Evidence Database System”. Graduate students initially populated SEEDS with 216 summaries of empirical software engineering studies. The summaries were randomly sampled and reviewed by industry professionals who found the student-written summaries to be at least as useful as professional-written summaries. In fact, 30% more of the respondents found the student-written summaries to be “very useful”. Motivations, student and instructor-developed prototypes, and assessments of the resulting artifacts will be discussed.     

A View of Software Development Environments Based on Activity Theory

We view software development as a collaborative activity that is typically supported by a software development environment. Since these environments can significantly influence the collaborative nature of a software development project, it is important to analyze and evaluate their capabilities with respect to collaboration. In this paper, we present an analysis and evaluation of the collaborative capabilities of software development environments using an activity theory perspective.The discipline of software engineering (SE) emerged to study and develop artifacts to mediate the collective development of large software systems. While many advances have been made in the past three decades of SE's existence, the historical origins of the discipline are present in that techniques and tools to support the collaborative aspects of large-scale software development are still lacking. One factor is a common ``production-oriented' philosophy that emphasizes the mechanistic and individualistic aspects of software development over the collaborative aspects thereby ignoring the rich set of human-human interactions that are possible over the course of a software development project.We believe that the issues and ideas surrounding activity theory may be useful in improving support for collaboration in software engineering techniques and tools. As such, we make use of the activity theory to analyze and evaluate process-centered software development environments (PCSDEs).     

软件工程技术发展思索

在4个方面对软件工程技术的发展进行一些思索:(1) 从事物发展规律的角度,揭示软件工程技术发展历程;(2) 从软件本质特征的角度,浅析虚拟机各抽象层次的构造;(3) 从软件开发的本质,提出了软件工程学科研究的内容,并研究了软件工业化生产模式;(4) 以Internet的出现为背景,探索了软件技术的发展趋势.     

基于大规模工程实践的软件工程专业建设的探索与创新

工程实践是软件工程专业建设十分重要的环节,如何通过与企业深入合作,在实战中培养从事大规模软件工程的软件人才,是建设软件工程专业的院校都需要面临的问题。本文介绍了浙江大学软件工程专业以大规模国际化产学研合作项目为基础,在教育体系、课程体系、工程实践体系和校企合作生态环境建设等方面进行的深入探索和创新。十余年的实践效果表明,探索取得了良好的建设成效。     

Metaphor, myth and mimicry: The bases of software engineering

The term software engineering has had a problematic history since its appearance in the 1960s. At first seen as a euphemism for programming, it has now come to encompass a wide range of activities. At its core lies the desire of software developers to mimic ‘real’ engineers, and claim the status of an engineering discipline. Attempts to establish such a discipline, however, confront pressing commercial demands for cheap and timely software products. This paper briefly examines some of the claims for the engineering nature of software development, before moving to argue that the term ‘engineering’ itself carries with it some unwanted baggage. This contributes to the intellectual quandary in which software development finds itself, and this is exacerbated by many writers who rely upon and propagate a mythical view of ‘engineering.’ To complicate matters further, our understanding of software development is grounded in a series of metaphors that highlight some key aspects of the field, but push other important issues into the shadows. A re‐reading of Brooks' “No Silver Bullet” paper indicates that the metaphorical bases of software development have been recognized for some time. They cannot simply be jettisoned, but perhaps they need widening to incorporate others such as Brooks' concepts of growth and nurture of software. Two examples illustrate the role played by metaphor in software development, and the paper concludes with the idea that perhaps we need to adopt a more critical stance to the ‘engineering’ roots of our endeavours*. *I should like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the first draft of this paper. Two of them offered useful advice to enhance the finished version; the third gave vent to a perfectly valid concern, that the argument as stated could have grave side effects if it was used as a point of leverage in arguments over ownership of the term ‘engineering.’ I understand this concern and the potential financial implications that prompt its expression; but in the longer term I see this exercise in clarification as a contribution to such discussions, inasmuch as it helps defuse the potency of terms such as ‘engineering.’ This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

如何实现计算机软件工程标准化发展方向

在现代计算机科学中,软件工程是一个兼顾与计算机应用和软件应用的学科。在整个软件工程中,既有数据库、access、也有C＋＋等内容。而更是因为其编程的复杂性,所以在工作上更容易与工程师的个人生活产生很大的影响。所以对于软件科学的标准化有着重大的意义。在文章中,将对我国目前软件工程的标准进行研究和探寻,从而进行一个分析。为我国的软件发展提供一个重要的依据。     

The role of model checking in software engineering

Model checking is a formal verification technique. It takes an exhaustively strategy to check hardware circuits and network protocols against desired properties. Having been developed for more than three decades, model checking is now playing an important role in software engineering for verifying rather complicated software artifacts.This paper surveys the role of model checking in software engineering. In particular, we searched for the related literatures published at reputed conferences, symposiums, workshops, and journals, and took a survey of (1) various model checking techniques that can be adapted to software development and their implementations, and (2) the use of model checking at different stages of a software development life cycle. We observed that model checking is useful for software debugging, constraint solving, and malware detection, and it can help verify different types of software systems, such as object- and aspect-oriented systems, service-oriented applications, web-based applications, and GUI applications including safety- and mission-critical systems.The survey is expected to help human engineers understand the role of model checking in software engineering, and as well decide which model checking technique(s) and/or tool(s) are applicable for developing, analyzing and verifying a practical software system. For researchers, the survey also points out how model checking has been adapted to their research topics on software engineering and its challenges.     

Process-Based Software Engineering: Building the Infrastructures

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process.This expanded domain of software engineering exposes the limitations of existing methodologies that often address only individual subdomains. There is, therefore, a demand for an overarching approach that provide a basis for theoretical and practical infrastructures capable of accommodating the whole range of modern software engineering practices and requirements. One approach is provided by Process-Based Software Engineering (PBSE); part of the more general trend towards a focus on process.This paper provides a review of process techniques for software engineering and a high-level perspective on PBSE. Typical approaches and techniques for the establishment, assessment, improvement and benchmarking of software engineering process systems are introduced in this paper, and many are developed further in other contributions to this volume.     

一种适合于GIS开发的软件工程方法

介绍了一种面向对象的软件工程方法——统一软件开发过程(United Software Development Process，USDP)。结合军事地理信息系统(Military Geographic Information System，MGIS)软件的开发实践，详细描述了这种适合GIS开发的软件工程方法的思想、软件开发过程和模型元素。统一软件开发过程的思想包括用例驱动、以体系结构为中心、迭代和增量等。它的模型元素则包括工作人员、行为、成果和工作流程。     

From knowledge based software engineering to knowware based software engineering

The first part of this paper reviews our efforts on knowledge-based software engineering, namely PROMIS, started from 1990s. The key point of PROMIS is to generate applications automatically based on domain knowledge as well as software knowledge. That is featured by separating the development of domain knowledge from the development of software. But in PROMIS, we did not find an appropriate representation for the domain knowledge. Fortunately, in our recent work, we found such a carrier for knowledge modules, i.e. knowware. Knowware is a commercialized form of domain knowledge. This paper briefly introduces the basic definitions of knowware, knowledge middleware and knowware engineering. Three life circle models of knowware engineering and the design of corresponding knowware implementations are given. Finally we discuss application system automatic generation and domain knowledge modeling on the J2EE platform, which combines the techniques of PROMIS, knowware and J2EE, and the development and deployment framework, i.e. PROMIS/KW＊＊.     

大数据视域下软件工程技术应用的实现路径

随着大数据时代的来临,大数据技术深入贯穿社会生产、生活的方方面面,尤其是随着5G通信技术的广泛应用,软件工程技术的应用迎来了前所未有的发展机遇和挑战。文章将大数据视域下软件工程技术应用的实现路径作为研究对象,从大数据及软件工程技术概述入手,充分分析了软件工程的核心技术,进而提出大数据视域下软件工程技术应用的实现路径,希望以此来不断提高软件工程技术的应用水平。