Softwaretechnik / Software Engineering (Lecture)

Quicklinks: News - Sessions - Formalia - Links & Literature

News

• 2025-04-01: Homepage online.

Sessions

The course will be organised as an in-person course. Opportunities for virtual participation in the lectures and tutorials are not planned. 

We will publish lecture materials and exercise sheets on ILIAS. People registered on HisInOne will be added automatically once the course is online. If you have no access to the Ilias course after April 22nd, please send an email providing your RZ-login to Elisabeth.

Lecture and tutorial will take place Wednesdays and Thursdays 16:00 - 18:00. We may switch lecture and tutorial on need. An updated schedule can be found in the Ilias course.

The lecture is accompanied by optional exercise sheets. Solutions to these exercise sheets are discussed in the tutorial. We encourage you to actively participate in the discussion.

Formalia

Studienleistung

There will be two mandatory homework assignments during the term. 50% of the total points from these two assignments are sufficient to pass the "Studienleistung".

Exam

There will be a written exam:

• Date, time, location: see HisInOne.

• Duration: 90 minutes.

You may bring one DIN A4 sheet to the exam. Both sides of this sheet may be filled with any notes (e.g., definitions, theorems, examples) but the notes have to be handwritten (directly on a piece of paper not on some electronic device and then printed out). You must not use any other material in the exam (except for writing utensils).

Module result

The module result (grade/mark, "Note") is completely determined by the exam.

Links & Literature

• Software Engineering Textbooks
  • Ludewig, J. and Lichter, H. (2013). Software Engineering. dpunkt.verlag, 3. edition.
    Main inspiration for the lecture; unfortunately only available in German. Available as e-Book via UB.
  • Sommerville, I. (2010). Software Engineering. Pearson, 10. edition.
    The international "classic".  Available as e-Book via UB. (Book also available in German.)
  • Balzert, H. (2009). Lehrbuch der Softwaretechnik: Basiskonzepte und Requirements Engineering. Springer Spektrum, 3. edition.
    The german "classic", part 1.  Available as e-Book via UB.
  • Balzert, H. (2010). Lehrbuch der Softwaretechnik: Entwurf, Implementierung, Installation und Betrieb. Springer Spektrum, 3. edition.
    The german "classic", part 2. Avaliable as e-Book via UB.
  • Bjørner, D. (2006). Software Engineering 1 - Abstraction and Modelling. Springer.
    One of the few formal methods textbooks, part 1.
  • Bjørner, D. (2006). Software Engineering 2 - Specification of Systems and Languages. Springer.
    One of the few formal methods textbooks, part 2.
  • Bjørner, D. (2006). Software Engineering 3 - Domains, Requirements, and Software Design. Springer.
    One of the few formal methods textbooks, part 3.
• Introduction
  • Bauer, F. L. (1971). Software Engineering. In: IFIP Congress (1), pages 530-538.
    Historic (type-writer typed) lecture notes by F. L. Bauer, one of the software engineering pioneers who is said to have brought up to the term 'software engineering' on the NATO Science Committee meeting in Garmisch, 1968, in response to the 'software crisis'.
  • Bjørner, D. and Havelund, K. (2014). 40 years of formal methods. . Presentation slides, UNSW, Sydney, 19. May 2014.
    A brief introduction of the term "formal methods", its historical and present obstacles and hindrances, and an outlook.
  • Buschermöhle, R. et al. (2006). success - Erfolgs- und Misserfolgsfaktoren bei der Durchführung von Hard- und Softwareentwicklungsprojekten in Deutschland. Version 1.1 (source site).
    A wealth of empirical data with a thorough evaluation wrt. a set of hypothesis on correlations of factors in software engineering.
  • Jones, C. B. et al., editors (2011). Dependable and Historic Computing - Essays Dedicated to Brian Randell on the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, volume 6875 of LNCS, Springer.
    Timeless insights on software engineering from the early days, including an article by software engineering pioneer D. L. Parnas and the dinner talk by H. Kopetz. Available as e-Book via UB.
  • Most ISO/IEEE/etc. standards are unfortunately not freely available.
  • Lamport, L. (2015). Who Builds a House without Drawing Blueprints?. CACM; 58(4): 38-41.
    A somewhat polemic essay arguing for better planning in software engineering by 2013 ACM Turing Award winner (and LaTeX author) Leslie Lamport; not so far off from our approach to the software engineering lecture...
• Project Management, Process Models, Metrics
  • Brooks, F. P. (1996). The Mythical Man-Month - Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition. Addison-Wesley.
    Some say "if you want to read only one book on the management of software development projects, let it be this" (without being the author or otherwise sponsored by the publisher).  An e-Book of the 1st edition from 1974 is freely available here.
  • Douglass, B. P. (1999). Doing Hard Time, Addison-Wesley.
    Spiral-shaped development process using formal modelling and analysis especially for (safety) critical, reactive, timed systems.
  • Wheeler, D. A. (2006). The Linux Kernel: It’s Worth More!
    A COCOMO estimation of effort for the Linux kernel 2.6.  Article includes a link to the used tool SLOCCount.
  • Karn, J. S., & Cowling, A. J. (2005). A Study into the Effect of Disruptions on the Performance of Software Engineering Teams. In the Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, (ISESE 2005).
  • Behfar, K. J., Peterson, R. S., Mannix, E. A., Trochim,  W.M. (2008). The critical role of conflict resolution in teams: a close look at the links between conflict type, conflict management strategies, and team outcomes. J Appl Psychol.; 93(1):170-88. doi: 10.1037/0021-9010.93.1.170.
  • V-Modell XT Authors (2006). V-Modell XT, Version 1.4.
    The V-Modell XT reference document (in German); an English document for V-Modell XT, version 1.3, is available on the same homepage. A tool to support tailoring is available here.
    (Version 2.0 (in German); may not be subject of the lecture since it seems not to have an English translation so far.)
  • CMMI Product Team (2010). CMMI for Development, Version 1.3.
    Definition of the CMMI-DEV process metrics.  German translation is available here. An introdution to the appraisal procedure is available here.
• Requirements Engineering, Live Sequence Charts
  
• Rupp, Ch., die SOPHISTen (2014). Requirements-Engineering und -Management. Hanser.
  An extensive and comprehensive discussion of all aspects of Requirements Enginering, from formal notations, over quality criteria, recommendations for natural language requirements, to psychological aspects like human perception and conflicts among clients, which may show up during requirements engineering.  The book's content builds on the main author's experience as general manager of SOPHIST GmbH, a company offering Requirements Engineering.  Unfortunately only available in German. But: Available as e-Book via UB.
• Damm, W., Harel, D. (2001). LSCs: Breathing Life into Message Sequence Charts. FMSD; 19(1): 45-80, Kluwer Academic Press.
  The original work on Life Sequence Charts.
• Klose, J. (2003): Live Sequence Charts - A Graphical Formalism for the Specification of Communication Behavior. PhD thesis, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg.
  The original work on the TBA-semantics of LSCs as used in the lecture.
• Typesetting Live Sequence Charts: lsc.sty on CTAN (and included in TeX Live).
• Architecture & Design, Modelling
  
• Jacobson, I. (1992). Object-Oriented Software Engineering: A Use CASE Approach. Addison-Wesley.
  By the inventor and early advocate of use cases and use case diagrams, which were later included in UML. 20 years old, odd-looking notation, yet the basic messages remain valid.
• Kastens, U., Kleine Büning, H. (2014). Modellierung - Grundlagen und formale Methoden, Zweite Auflage, Carl Hanser Verlag.
  General Discussion of Modelling, not focusing on UML, but also considering plain set-theory, graphs, Petri nets, and their use for modelling tasks.
• Buschman, F., Beunier, R., Rohnert, H., Sommerlad, P., Stal, M. (1996). Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, Volume 1, A System of Patterns. Wiley.
  Actually closer to the content of Lecture 14 than the (more famous) standard textbook on design patterns (Gamma et al.) The concrete examples may provoke nostalgic feelings ("this sounds soo early 90s of the last century") but the basic messages still hold. Available as e-Book via UB.
• UML
  • B. Dobing, J. Parsons: How UML is used, Communications of the ACM, 49(5):109-114, 2006.
    This survey supports the relevance of our choice of diagrams to be considered in the lecture.
  • OMG (2011). Unified Modeling Language: Infrastructure. Version 2.4.1.
    The UML standard, basic concepts.  May take some getting-used-to.
  • OMG (2011). Unified Modeling Language: Superstructure. Version 2.4.1.
    Defines all the diagrams using concepts from the infrastructure document.
  • B. Oesterreich: Analyse und Design mit UML 2.1, 8. Auflage, Oldenbourg, 2006.
    Standard introduction into UML notation (only informal semantics).
  • H. Stoerrle: UML 2 fuer Studenten, Pearson Studium Verlag, 2005.
    And another one of the like.
    (avaible as e-book via UB)
  • OMG (2014). Object Constraint Language. Version 2.4.
    Our Proto-OCL semantics is inspired by Appendix A (finally something more formal...).
  • Kleppe, A., Warmer, J. (2004). The Object Constraint Language. 2nd Edition, Addison-Wesley..
    A more palatable presentation of OCL.
• Formal Verification
• Apt, K.R., Olderog, E.-R. (1994). Programmverifikation. Springer-Verlag.
  The formal verification part of Lecture 15 is following the thorough presentation in this (highly recommendable) book.  Also available in English.
• (2015) The VCC Manual.
  A draft document to become a manual for VCC.  For the exercises, it should not be necessary to revert to this document too much, the content of the lecture should be sufficient.
• Cohen, E., Hillebrand, A., Tobies, S., Moskal, M., Schulte, W. (2015). Verifying C Programs: A VCC Tutorial. Technical Report.
  A tutorial on VCC, distributed with the VCC sources.  Again: for the exercises, you should not need much more than discussed in the lecture.  We're only touching the surface of VCC.
• Miscellaneous
  • O. Laitenberger, C. Atkinson: Generalizing Perspective-based Inspection to handle Object-Oriented Development Artifacts, In: Proc. ICSE '99, 494-503, IEEE CS-Press.
    Reading techniques philosophy.
  • G. H. Travassos, F. Shull, J. Carver, V. R. Basili: Reading Techniques for OO Design Inspections, Technical Report CS-TR-4353, University of Maryland, 2002.
    Concrete reading techniques.