Award-winning author Steve McConnell offers candid reflections upon the state of software development today and a critical look at the work needed to turn software engineering into a true profession. This talk highlights key trends and calls for a more rigorous and standards-based profession. The ideas presented in this talk will help software developers step back from the day-to-day rush of th...

This paper proposes a new approach to locating software components from a large component repository: context-aware browsing. Without any explicit input from software developers, this approach automatically locates and presents a list of software components that could possibly be used in the current development situation. This automation of the component location process not only greatly reduce...

Modern software development is highly knowledge intensive; it requires that software developers create and share new knowledge during their daily work. However, current software development environments are “syntantic”, i.e. they do not facilitate understanding the semantics of software artifacts and hence cannot fully support the knowledge-driven activities of developers. In this paper we pres...

Open source software development represents a fundamentally new concept in the field of software engineering. Open source development and delivery occurs on Internet time. Developers are not confined to a geographic area. They work voluntarily on a project of their choice. Developers work for peer-recognition and self-satisfaction. Open Source software is always in an evolutionary stage: it nev...

Concurrent Programming in ML presents the language Concurrent ML (CML), which supports the union of two important programming models: concurrent programming and functional programming. CML is an extension of the functional language Standard ML (SML) and is included as part of the Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) distribution. CML supports the programming of process communication and synchroni...

The issue of strategic software development management generally assumes the organization is in the software industry. However, there are cases of non-software vendors who have successfully built from within and even disseminated the results within their industry. These organizations must also grapple with strategic and tactical software management issues. Case studies and comparisons of such o...

For decades now, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers’ productivity is to focus on people. Indeed, while human factors have been recognized in Software Engineering research, few empirical investigations have attempted to verify the claim. Development tasks are undertaken through cognitive processing abilities. Affective states – emotions, moods, and feelings have an imp...

Software is intangible and knowledge about software systems is typically tacit. The mental model of software developers is thus an important factor in software engineering. It is our vision that developers should be able to refer to code as being “up in the north”, “over in the west”, or “down-under in the south”. We want to provide developers, and everyone else involved in software development...

Classes is the basic unit in object oriented software, therefore their quality has significant impact on the overall quality of the software. Class cohesion is one of the important factors that determine whether the design quality of a software is good or bad. In software development it is essential for software developers to gauge the degree of cohesion; yet in software development practice, i...