Wang Y. Software Engineering Foundations. A Software Science Perspective

Auerbach Publications, 2008, -1419 p.Software engineering is a discipline of engineering science that studies the nature of software, approaches and methodologies of large-scale software development, and theories and laws behind software behaviors and software engineering practices.
Software engineering appears still to be a young and immature science and engineering discipline characterized by a wide variety of segmented knowledge, a lack of a theoretical framework, and a bountiful inefficient industrial practice. To deal with the difficulties inherent in large-scale software development, rigorous and transdisciplinary foundations of software engineering are yet to be explored. A particular gap in the current software engineering curriculum is the missing of a fundamental framework that would provide students and practitioners for overarching, durable, and transdisciplinary theories, in order to explain a great many complicated phenomena and problems of software engineering in terms of a core set of theoretical and organizational foundations.
This book attempts to set forth a comprehensive, coherent, and rigorous framework of theoretical and empirical foundations of software engineering. It covers a wide range of necessary foundations for software engineering, such as those of philosophy, mathematics, computing, linguistics, informatics, engineering science, cognitive informatics, systems science, management, economics, and sociology.
It is recognized that two important reasons make software engineering an ideal testbed for existing theories and methodologies in the forementioned disciplines from mathematics to cognitive informatics, and from management science to sociology. The reasons are:
a) Software engineering is the latest and the most complicated engineering branch that mankind has ever experienced.
b) Software engineering is inherently a transdisciplinary field in both its theoretical foundations and empirical applications.
Constrained by the cognitive, organizational, and resources limitations and their complicated interrelations, most problems in software engineering are innately complicated. Many of them has been observed in the very beginning of software engineering for 40 years, some of them may even be traced back to more than a century ago in management science and system philosophy.
Therefore, a rigorous book is expected to explore and address a set of coherent and unified principles, foundations, theories, laws, models, frameworks, and empirical methodologies of software engineering. These have motivated the basic research into software engineering foundations as presented in this book with a software science perspective.Part I. Principles and Constraints of Software EngineeringPrinciples of Software Engineering
Part II. Theoretical Foundations of Software Engineering
Philosophical Foundations of Software Engineering
Mathematical Foundations of Software Engineering
Computing Foundations of Software Engineering
Linguistics Foundations of Software Engineering
Information Science Foundations of Software Engineering
Part III. Organizational Foundations of Software Engineering
Engineering Foundations of Software Engineering
Cognitive Informatics Foundations of Software Engineering
System Science Foundations of Software Engineering
Management Science Foundations of Software Engineering
Economics Foundations of Software Engineering
Sociology Foundations of Software Engineering
Part IV. Perspectives on Software Science
Retrospect on Software Engineering
Prospect on Software ScienceA. Mathematical Symbols, Notations, and Abbreviations
B. Constraints of Software Engineering
C. Empirical Principles of Software Engineering
D. Models of Entities and Structures of Software Engineering
E. Wang’s Laws of Software Engineering
F. Wang’s Formal Principles of Software Engineering
G. The Type System of Software Engineering
H. Meta Processes of Software Engineering
I. Algebraic Process Relations of Software Engineering
J. Deductive Semantics of Software Engineering
K. Formal Models of the ATM System in RTPA
L. List of Figures
M. List of Tables