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Handbook of software engineering
Cha S., Taylor R., Kang K., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2019. 524 pp. Type: Book (978-3-030002-61-9)
Date Reviewed: Feb 14 2020

Over 50 years after the “identification of software engineering as a discipline,” the emergence of new types of systems, new application areas, and new techniques and frameworks for software development means that the discipline is still undergoing significant evolutionary changes. This handbook is intended to provide a survey of the current state of the art, including long-known, generally accepted, and durable ideas and practices, as well as newer concepts that are still evolving.

The volume is structured as 13 chapters written by different experts, each addressing a different subdiscipline of software engineering. The subjects range from familiar software processes, requirements engineering, and software design, to modern areas such as coordination technologies, self-adaptive systems, and software engineering with cloud-based resources and services (such as virtualization and service-based models of computation and storage). The chapters generally consist of surveys of the early influential ideas in each subdiscipline followed by discussions of open research questions. Each chapter is accompanied by an extensive list of references.

The editors correctly describe this volume in the preface: “a concise and authoritative survey of the state of the art in software engineering.” The coverage is both broad and reasonably detailed. However, it is not fully comprehensive in covering the various subdisciplines of the field--omitting, for example, software estimation and configuration management--and methodologies are not always described in sufficient detail to allow immediate application.

The content is informative and clearly written, appropriate illustrations are included, and the information is concisely presented. The scope is broad and the coverage reasonably deep for a one-volume treatment of such a wide-ranging subject. The inclusion and clear explanations of certain topical subjects are a particularly positive feature of the volume taken as a whole, though future evolution and consolidation of these relatively new subdisciplines will cause these sections in particular to age with the passage of time and advances in technologies, practice, and research.

This handbook is suitable mainly for academia, particularly graduate students and researchers, who will find the newer subdisciplines and summaries of open questions particularly interesting. Practitioners working in commercial software engineering who may be looking for detailed information on applying solution techniques to particular problems may find it less useful, though even they should find it useful as a gateway to both historical and current approaches, techniques, and resources. Technical managers should also find it to be an accessible survey of both old and new subdisciplines and approaches.

Reviewer:  R. M. Malyankar Review #: CR146892 (2008-0175)
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