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Tentative suggestion: change "class" to "book"
I am using this book for a class, but we consider it as a standalone textbook, so it feels a little strange to read about "this class" in the textbook. I could easily understand if you prefer not to adopt this change. It is just a suggestion.
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There are also _economic_ roles that software plays in society that it didn't before. Around the world, software is a major source of job growth, but also a major source of automation, eliminating jobs that people used to do. These larger forces that software is playing on the world demand that software engineers have a stronger understanding of the roles that software plays in society, as the decisions that engineers make can have profoundly impactful unintended consequences.
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There are also _economic_ roles that software plays in society that it didn't before. Around the world, software is a major source of job growth, but also a major source of automation, eliminating jobs that people used to do. These larger forces that software is playing on the world demand that software engineers have a stronger understanding of the roles that software plays in society, as the decisions that engineers make can have profoundly impactful unintended consequences.
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We're nowhere close to having deep answers about these questions, neither the old ones or the new ones. We know _a lot_ about programming languages and _a lot_ about testing. These are areas amenable to automation and so computer science has rapidly improved and accelerated these parts of software engineering. The rest of it, as we shall see in this, has not made much progress. In this class, we'll discuss what we know and the much larger space of what we don't.
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We're nowhere close to having deep answers about these questions, neither the old ones or the new ones. We know _a lot_ about programming languages and _a lot_ about testing. These are areas amenable to automation and so computer science has rapidly improved and accelerated these parts of software engineering. The rest of it, as we shall see, has not made much progress. In this book, we'll discuss what we know and the much larger space of what we don't.
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So you know what you're going to build and how you're going to build it. What process should you go about building it? Who's going to build what? What order should you build it in? How do you make sure everyone is in sync while you're building it?<pettersen16> And most importantly, how to do you make sure you build well and on time? These are fundamental questions in software engineering with many potential answers. Unfortunately, we still don't know which of those answers are right.
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So you know what you're going to build and how you're going to build it. What process should you go about building it? Who's going to build what? What order should you build it in? How do you make sure everyone is in sync while you're building it?<pettersen16> And most importantly, how to do you make sure you build well and on time? These are fundamental questions in software engineering with many potential answers. Unfortunately, we still don't know which of those answers are right.
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At the foundation of all of these questions are basic matters of [project management|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management]: plan, execute, and monitor. But developers in the 1970's and on found that traditional project management ideas didn't seem to work. The earliest process ideas followed a "waterfall" model, in which a project begins by identifying requirements, writing specifications, implementing, testing, and releasing, all under the assumption that every stage could be fully tested and verified. (Recognize this? It's the order of topics we're discussing in this class!). Many managers seemed to like the waterfall model because it seemed structured and predictable; however, because most managers were originally software developers, they preferred a structured approach to project management<weinberg82>. The reality, however, was that no matter how much verification one did of each of these steps, there always seemed to be more information in later steps that caused a team to reconsider it's earlier decision (e.g., imagine a customer liked a requirement when it was described in the abstract, but when it was actually built, they rejected it, because they finally saw what the requirement really meant).
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At the foundation of all of these questions are basic matters of [project management|https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management]: plan, execute, and monitor. But developers in the 1970's and on found that traditional project management ideas didn't seem to work. The earliest process ideas followed a "waterfall" model, in which a project begins by identifying requirements, writing specifications, implementing, testing, and releasing, all under the assumption that every stage could be fully tested and verified. (Recognize this? It's the order of topics we're discussing in this book!). Many managers seemed to like the waterfall model because it seemed structured and predictable; however, because most managers were originally software developers, they preferred a structured approach to project management<weinberg82>. The reality, however, was that no matter how much verification one did of each of these steps, there always seemed to be more information in later steps that caused a team to reconsider it's earlier decision (e.g., imagine a customer liked a requirement when it was described in the abstract, but when it was actually built, they rejected it, because they finally saw what the requirement really meant).
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In 1988, Barry Boehm proposed an alternative to waterfall called the *Spiral model*<boehm88>: rather than trying to verify every step before proceeding to the next level of detail, _prototype_ every step along the way, getting partial validation, iteratively converging through a series of prototypes toward both an acceptable set of requirements _and_ an acceptable product. Throughout, risk assessment is key, encouraging a team to reflect and revise process based on what they are learning. What was important about these ideas were not the particulars of Boehm's proposed process, but the disruptive idea that iteration and process improvement are critical to engineering great software.
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In 1988, Barry Boehm proposed an alternative to waterfall called the *Spiral model*<boehm88>: rather than trying to verify every step before proceeding to the next level of detail, _prototype_ every step along the way, getting partial validation, iteratively converging through a series of prototypes toward both an acceptable set of requirements _and_ an acceptable product. Throughout, risk assessment is key, encouraging a team to reflect and revise process based on what they are learning. What was important about these ideas were not the particulars of Boehm's proposed process, but the disruptive idea that iteration and process improvement are critical to engineering great software.
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