IN4MATX 43 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: No Silver Bullet, Software Engineering, Formal Verification
Document Summary
Software: code, documentation, user manuals, design specifications, test cases, and plans and schedules. Engineering: skill and knowledge, application of scientific principles, trade-offs, and cost/benefit analysis. Managing the complexity of both a problem and its solution, to create a software product that successfully solves the problem. Informatics 43 definition for software engineering: the process of constructing software. Business perspective: cost of developing (purchasing) software, time to market of product. Profit that will be made the sale of the product. Separation of concerns: modularity, divide and conquer, abstraction, anticipation of change, generality. Essential properties of software engineering: complexity, no two parts are alike, difficult communication, to modify/extend, unreliability, conformity. Software must conform to human institutions and systems: changeability, all successful software gets changed because it can and people always want it too. Invisibility: the reality of software is not inherently embedded in space, difficult understanding and communication. False silver bullets: high-level languages, time-sharing, unified programming environments, object-oriented programming, ai, automatic/graphical programming, workstations.
