Practical Software Engineering: A Case-Study Approach

The distinctive character of this book stems from two endeavors. First, this book is about the way software engineering is done in practice. Second, it is about software engineering for enterprise applications. ¿Enterprise applications include payroll, patient records, shipping tracking, cost analysis, credit scoring, insurance, supply chain, accounting, customer service, and foreign exchange trading. Enterprise applications don¿t include automobile fuel injection, word processors, elevator controllers, chemical plant controllers, telephone switches, operating systems, compilers, and games.¿ (Fowler, 2003, p.3). The book is pivoted on one main case-study, a large number of supporting examples, and end-of-chapter problem-solving exercises consisting of case-study exercises and minicases. A particular organization that the case-study, problem-solving exercises and most examples are derived from is a company specializing in advertising expenditure measurement. The book endeavors to give broad software engineering knowledge and to provide background information prior to presenting case-study solutions. However, a distinguishing emphasis of the book is to concentrate on support skills for system design and programming. For given requirements, the book iteratively develops design and implementation models. Case-study, examples and problem-solving exercises are carefully selected to emphasize various aspects of software development as necessitated by unique characteristics of different applications and target software solutions.  The book consists of four parts. Part A (Software projects) discusses software lifecycle, software engineering tools, project planning, budgeting and scheduling, project quality, risk management, and change management. The next three parts (B, C, and D) concentrate on methods, techniques, processes, and development environments of software engineering.  The case-study, examples and problem-solving exercises are based on the experience gained from a large ACNielsen project. For pedagogical reasons, industrial problems and solutions have been simplified and re-implemented specifically for the purpose of the book. Occasionally, for comparative purposes, more than one programming environment has been used in presented solutions. All programming code, including code not presented in the text, is available on the book¿s website. The code is mostly Java accessing Oracle database.      

這本書的獨特之處來自於兩個努力。首先，這本書是關於軟體工程在實踐中的方式。其次，它是關於企業應用軟體工程。企業應用包括薪資、病人記錄、貨運追蹤、成本分析、信用評分、保險、供應鏈、會計、客戶服務和外匯交易。企業應用不包括汽車燃油噴射、文字處理器、電梯控制器、化工廠控制器、電話交換機、作業系統、編譯器和遊戲（Fowler，2003年，第3頁）。這本書以一個主要的案例研究為基礎，並提供大量的支援例子和章末問題解決練習，包括案例研究練習和小案例。案例研究、例子和問題解決練習主要來自一家專門從事廣告支出測量的公司。該書旨在提供廣泛的軟體工程知識，並在提供案例研究解決方案之前提供背景信息。然而，該書的一個區別性重點是專注於系統設計和編程的支援技能。對於給定的需求，該書迭代地開發設計和實施模型。案例研究、例子和問題解決練習被精心選擇，以強調軟體開發的各個方面，這是由不同應用和目標軟體解決方案的獨特特性所需要的。該書分為四個部分。A部分（軟體專案）討論軟體生命週期、軟體工程工具、專案計劃、預算和排程、專案品質、風險管理和變更管理。接下來的三個部分（B、C和D）專注於軟體工程的方法、技術、流程和開發環境。案例研究、例子和問題解決練習基於從一個大型ACNielsen專案中獲得的經驗。出於教學目的，工業問題和解決方案已經被簡化並重新實施，專門用於本書。為了比較目的，有時在呈現的解決方案中使用了多個編程環境。所有編程代碼，包括未在文本中呈現的代碼，都可以在該書的網站上找到。該代碼主要是使用Java訪問Oracle數據庫。