Excerpts

Dedication This book is respectfully dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Philip Roy Pont, who died at the age of ninety-two on the 15th of April 1995, without ever growing old. Preface This book focuses on the engineering of substantial bespoke systems: that is, on the development of specialised software products for a single or limited number of clients. For all but the most trivial of projects, this development will be carried out jointly by a team of engineers. My specific objectives in writing are as follows: To provide a pragmatic introduction to the field of software engineering. To compare and contrast the three major software development strategies in widespread use at the present time: process-oriented ("structured") development, data-oriented development and object-oriented development. To introduce the C++ programming language, and to illustrate, through a series of substantial case studies, the engineering of C++ programs for a broad spectrum of software projects, from decision support systems to real-time embedded systems. To demonstrate the practical benefits of Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) by including a high-quality CASE tool with the book, and making use of this tool for all examples in the text. Readers are assumed to be professionally interested in some aspect of software engineering. They may, for example, be practising software engineers trained in COBOL or FORTRAN and wishing to update their skills. They may be software engineering, computer science or electronic engineering students, or lecturers on such programmes. Readers are expected to have had some previous high-level programming experience, but no specific experience with C or C++ is assumed. Within a university or college environment, the material may be found most suitable for intermediate-level (Second Year in the UK) students, perhaps following a short introductory programming course. The material in the text has been thoroughly "field tested", having formed the basis for a number of commercial training courses which I have presented over several years. It has also been used in my university undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, first in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, and more recently in the Department of Engineering at the University of Leicester. Acknowledgements In a project such as this, one name appears on the cover, but the book only exists because of the efforts of others behind the scenes. It is a pleasure, therefore, to be able to publicly thank those who have been involved in bringing this work to fruition. I thank all my friends and colleagues at Sheffield University and Leicester University for many helpful discussions: Fernando Schlindwein and Derek Andrews both deserve special mention. I thank John Fothergill both for his encouragement, and also for enlightening me about the roots of the engineering profession. The book wouldn't have appeared at all without the active support of Barrie Jones, then Head of the Department of Engineering in Leicester. Particular thanks are also due to Andy Norman, without whom the C++ examples in this book would include many more bugs than they do. Pop Sharma and Andy Willby each deserve medals for surviving many debugging sessions. This book has arisen, in part, from my experiences with software development on a number of research projects over the past ten years, mainly involving the computer simulation of parts of the human auditory nervous system. This work would not have been possible without the support of a great many people, among them Bob Damper, Phil Green and John Frisby. Particular thanks are also due to my long-suffering postgraduate students - David Sewell, Chen Pang Wong, Kien Seng Wong and Eric Worrall - for putting up with absence of their supervisor (in mind when not in body) during the gestation of this text during the past twelve months. Thanks are also due to David for his help with several of the code examples, to Kien Seng for the screen shot in Chapter 14, and to Chen Pang and Eric for their work on the appendices. I thank all the undergraduate students who have endured my courses in programming and software engineering, for asking tough questions and teaching me a great deal in the process: Daniel Grimwade and Vasanthi Sundaramoorthy in particular have kept me on my toes over the last two years. Thanks are also due to Lee Pasifull, Stuart Urban, Tony Vickers and Daniel Yeoh for useful comments on the evolving manuscript. I thank Emanuela Moreale for taking the trouble to provide a detailed review of the whole of an early draft of the manuscript, and Gordon Pont and Andrew Pont for useful comments on an even earlier draft. I thank the (anonymous) reviewers of the evolving manuscript for many helpful suggestions. I thank Simon Plumtree at Addison-Wesley for believing in this large, complicated project and getting it off the ground. I thank the staff at Select Software Tools: in particular, the book could not have appeared without the efforts of Virginia Tulk. I thank Bruce Springsteen for writing and recording "Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.". I thank all the folk at Leicester Software Engineering - Jane, Stephanie and Harry - without whom none of this would have been possible. Last, and most of all, I thank Sarah, my partner and my best friend. After a year which we have both shared with "The Book", any sanity I have left is entirely due to her. 020187718XP04062001 Excerpted from Software Engineering with C++ and Case Tools by Michael Pont All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.