Название: A Concise Introduction to Software Engineering: With Open Source and GenAI 2nd Edition
Автор: Pankaj Jalote
Издательство: Springer
Серия: Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science
Год: 2025
Страниц: 233
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Software engineering has changed: A software project today is likely to use large language models (LLMs) for some tasks and will employ some open-source software. It is therefore important to integrate open source and use of LLMs in teaching software engineering – a key goal of this textbook.

This reader-friendly textbook/reference introduces a carefully curated set of concepts and practices essential for key tasks in software projects. It begins with a chapter covering industry-standard software, open-source tools, and the basics of prompt engineering for LLMs. The second chapter delves into project management, including development process models, planning, and team-working. Subsequent chapters focus on requirements analysis and specification, architecture design, software design, coding, testing, and application deployment.

Each chapter presents concepts, practical methods, examples, the application of LLMs, and the role of open-source software. A companion website provides some comprehensive case studies, as well as teaching material including presentation slides.

Any software development now will probably use open source software and large language models (LLMs) or generative AI (genAI) for helping in some of the tasks. The open source movement has matured over the last few decades and open source software is now an important and integral part of the software ecosystem. LLMs, which arrived relatively recently, have taken the world by storm and are impacting all activities where generation of text (or other type of artifacts) is the goal, including software development. These two important trends are the reason for the sub-title of this edition “using open source and Generative AI”. While this edition of the book, like the previous one, will focus on developing software, for the major tasks involved in a development project, it will also discuss the use of open source and LLMs.

An introductory course on Software Engineering remains one of the hardest subjects to teach, primarily because of the wide range of topics the area encompasses. I have believed for some time that we often tend to teach too many concepts and topics in an introductory course, resulting in shallow knowledge and insufficient skills for applying the concepts.

I believe that an introductory course on Software Engineering should aim to empower students with the knowledge and skills that are needed to successfully execute a small team project to deliver a modest-sized software application to its users while employing proper practices and techniques. It is worth pointing out that a vast majority of the projects executed in the industry today fall in this scope—executed by a small team over a few months.

Hence, the goal of this book remains the same as before: introduce to the students a limited number of concepts and practices that will achieve the following two objectives:
• Help students develop the skills needed to build a modest-size application in a small team while employing proper practices and methodologies.
• Provide the students with decent conceptual background for undertaking advanced studies in software engineering.

The book is primarily intended for an introductory course on Software Engineering in any undergraduate or graduate program. It is targeted at faculty who teach this course and students who take it—generally those who know programming but have not had formal exposure to software engineering. The book can also be used by professionals who are in a similar state—know programming but want to be introduced to the systematic approach of software engineering.

Contents: