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Reviewer: Michael G. Murphy

Once upon a time, there was a standards-oriented systems engineer who felt inspired to fix the shortcomings in software engineering. With all the page-turning impact of a standards document, the pages came forth furiously, with an emphasis on systems jargon and an occasional aside lambasting agile development and rapid application development (RAD) in the software engineering domain. Alas, the tale does not end well for most potential readers. To be fair, this was probably an impossible mission from the beginning, even though there may be some large-scale project managers in and out of government who will embrace this text as a holy grail. The author is well intentioned, but the audience who will be receptive to his efforts will likely be rather small. It is particularly unfortunate that he did not include a running example to illustrate the concepts. The reinforcing nature of the writing tends to feel very repetitious. I admire the author for trying to address the content of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), but I found the mapping of SWEBOK to the book mostly superficial. The book is organized into three primary sections: fundamentals, practices, and application stages. The six chapters in the fundamentals section set a systems tone and use systems engineering nomenclature for software engineering. While some of the terms that these domains share have somewhat different meanings, the author consistently takes a systems perspective. The ten chapters in the practices section are the heart of the author's appeal to standardize the systems approach to software engineering. Chapter 15 on verification and validation and chapter 16 on control (configuration management) are particularly helpful and worthy of careful study. The last four chapters on the application stages are mostly for reinforcement and closure. So, who might find this book of interest__?__ Software engineering managers with a connection to large-scale or federal projects might find it useful as a reference to better appreciate the systems engineering point of view often present in such projects. It might also appeal to systems engineers wanting a systems-friendly description of software development and software engineers with a specific interest in standards and documentation. More reviews about this item: Amazon Online Computing Reviews Service