Mathematical Principles for a First Course in Software Engineering

The discipline of software engineering has transferred the cummonsense methods of good programming and management to large software projects. It has been less successful in acquiring a solid theoretical foundation for these methods. We have developed an introductory computer science course, much as calculus is a basic course for mathematics and the physical sciences, concerned primarily with theoretical foundations and methodology rather than apprenticeship through applications. This paper describes the principles taught in the course and gives a small example illustrating them.