Fifteen Principles of Software Engineering
Alan Mark Davis · 2015
The product of software engineering is not physical, physical laws do not form a suitable foundation. Instead, software engineering has had to evolve its principles based solely on observations of thousands of projects. If we were to examine software engineering's principles from 1964 (“always use short variable names;” “do whatever it takes to make your program smaller”), they would look downright silly. Today's principles will look equally silly in 30 years. This chapter describes 15 important principles, and also lists 15 others. Some of the important principles are: quality is the prime requirement; it is possible to develop high-quality software; deliver software products to customers early, and then work on the feedback; and determine the problem before writing the requirements.