List of software engineering topics
This list complements the software engineering article, giving more details and examples.
Influence on society
Software engineers affect society by creating applications. These applications produce value for users, and sometimes produce disasters.
Applications
Software engineers build applications 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.
- Accounting
- Analytics
- Airline reservations
- Banking
- Commerce
- Compilers
- Communication
- Computer graphics
- 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
- LIS Management of laboratory data
- MIS Management of financial and personnel data
- Logistics
- Manufacturing
- Music
- Networks and Internet
- Office suites
- Operating systems
- Robotics
- Signal analysis
- Simulation, supports almost every field.
- Sciences
- Traffic Control
- Training
- Visualization, supports almost every field
- Voting
- World wide web
Disasters
Software has played a role in many high-profile disasters.
Technologies and practices
Skilled software engineers use technologies and practices from a variety of fields to improve productivity and quality. These technologies and practices affects applications by making better programes easier and faster to write. The following technologies and practices are used in industry every day.
Software engineering topics
Many technologies and practices are (mostly) unique to software engineering,
though many of these are shared with computer science.
Programming paradigm, based on a programming language technology
Patterns, document many common programming and project management techniques
- Agile
- Heavyweight
- Process evaluation frameworks
A platform combines computer hardware and an operating system. As platforms become more powerful and less expensive, applications and tools become more widely available.
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.
Mathematics topics
Discrete mathematics is a key foundation of software engineering.
Other
Life cycle phases
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 - the software
- Database - schemas and data.
- Documentation, online and/or print, FAQ, Readme, 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
Business roles
Management topics
Business topics
Community topics
Pioneers
Many people made important contributions to SE technologies, practices, or applications.
- John Backus: Fortran, first optimizing compiler, BNF
- 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.
- Edsger Dijkstra: Wrote Notes on Structured Programming, A Discipline of Programming and Go To Statement Considered Harmful, algorithms, formal methods, pedegogy.
- Michael Fagan: Software inspection.
- Tom Gilb: Evolutionary processes.
- Grace Hopper: The first compiler (Mark 1), COBOL, Nanoseconds.
- Watts Humphrey: Capability Maturity Model, headed (founded?) the Software Engineering Institute.
- Ada
- 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: Computer risks, ACM Sigsoft.
- David Parnas: Module design, social responsibility, professionalism.
- Jef Raskin: Developed the original Macintosh GUI
- Dennis Ritchie: C and Unix.
- Waterfall model.
- architecture.
- Richard Stallman: Founder of the Free Software Foundation
- Linus Torvalds: Linux kernel, open source development.
- The Psychology of Computer Programming.
- Formal specifications.
- Structured programming, wrote The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer.
See also
Notable publications
- About Face by Alan Cooper, about user interface design.
- The Capability Maturity Model by Watts Humphrey. Written for the Software Engineering Institute, emphasizing management and process.
- 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.
- Design Patterns by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
- Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck
- Go To Statement Considered Harmful by Edsger Dijkstra.
- The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks, about project management.
- Object-oriented Analysis and Design by Grady Booch.
- Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister.
- Principles of Software Engineering Management by Tom Gilb about evolutionary processes.
- The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg. Written as an independent consultant, partly about his years at IBM.
- Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts.
See also
Professional topics
Odds and ends
Related fields
Different languages
- In Chinese, software engineer is called ruan jian gong cheng shi —— 软件工程师
- In German, software engineering is called Softwaretechnik.
- In Spanish, software engineering is called Ingeniería de software,
Miscellaneous and to do
See also
