Paper Reviews

Experience is a good way to understand the issues involved in software engineering. However, to better tackle the problems you encounter, you should get an overview of software engineering theory as well. In this course you are expected to read one paper each week and write a short review of the paper which expresses your understanding of the paper, as well as its position in the field of software engineering. You should add the review to your PersonalLog. Reviews will be checked together with the rest of your log at the end of the course.

Reviews

Structure

For each of the papers below, write short review which

• summarizes the paper (a few paragraphs)
• positions the topic of the paper within software engineering (one paragraph)
• discusses the relation of the paper to the relevant laws and principles of software engineering as described in the Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering
• states your opinion about the paper and the method it proposes (one or two paragraphs)

Format

• Write the review in english
• Use your own words! Copy and paste is plagiarism
• The review should be placed in your personal log

Grading

Your reviews will be given one grade together with your personal log. You are responsible for making sure that you add all the reviews to your log, which should have reviews for all papers.

Grades are determined based on the following points

• Adequate summary of paper and lecture
• Good understanding of position in software engineering
• Quality of writing (grammar, vocabulary, structure)

Papers and Book Chapters to Read

(Note that some of the papers are available from the ACM digital library; these papers can be downloaded from a computer at the University or via VPN.)

Requirements Engineering (week 36)

• Chapter 1: Introduction

• Chapter 2: Requirements definition, prototyping, and modeling

Software Configuration Management (week 37)

• Chapter 9: Project management and business analysis

• Walter Tichy. Software Configuration Management Overview.

Version management (week 38)

• Chapter 3: System design and specification

• The Subversion manual

Software deployment (week 39)

• Chapter 7: System manufacturing, distribution, and installation

• E. Dolstra, M. de Jonge, and E. Visser. Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment. In L. Damon, editor, 18th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA '04), Atlanta, Georgia, USA, November 2004. USENIX.

Software metrics (week 40)

• Chapter 11: Technology, architecture, and industry capabilities

• Chapter 12: Measurements, experiments, and emperical research

• Serge Demeyer, Stéphane Ducasse, Oscar Nierstrasz. Finding refactorings via change metrics. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications. pages 166 - 177. Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. ACM 2000.

Software testing (week 41)

• Chapter 5: Validation and static verification

• Chapter 6: Testing or dynamic verification

• David Hovemeyer and William Pugh. Finding Bugs is Easy, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, December 2004.

• Harry Robinson. Things That Find Bugs in the Night

Component Based Software Engineering (week 42)

• Chapter 4: System construction and composition

• Clemens Szyperski. Component Technology - What, Where, and How? 25th International Conference on Software Engineering. Portland, Oregon, May 03 - 10, 2003.

Software evolution (week 43)

• Chapter 8: System administration, evolution, and maintenance

• David Lorge Parnas. Software aging. In Proceedings of the 16th international conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'94). pp 279 - 287. Sorrento, Italy, 1994

Generative Software Development (week 44)

• K. Czarnecki. Overview of Generative Software Development. In J.-P. Banâtre et al. (Eds.): Unconventional Programming Paradigms (UPP) 2004, Mont Saint-Michel, France, LNCS 3566, pp. 313-328, 2005