Software engineering and software tools

Software engineering is my principal interest. I started programming in 1966 and have done it professionally since 1971. Yet I can barely stand to look at code I wrote six months ago. Learning is endless.

• A few decades ago, Dr. Donald Knuth invented literate programming: documentation and code are a single, integrated entity. All my recent work has been done using `Lightweight literate programming', inspired by my colleague Dr. Allan Stavely.
• Not just another methodology, `The Cleanroom software development methodology' is built on concrete mathematical principles. Since learning this technique, for the first time in my long career, I can honestly say that I have some confidence that my code will run correctly in most cases.
• Useful software reference and tutorial documentation
• I don't think you can build a reasonable working system without properly analyzing the problem first. The best single work I know on systems analysis is Tom DeMarco's book on structured analysis.
• In software engineering, it is all too easy to neglect the human side of the problem space. See `How organizations work (or don't)'.

Last updated: 2014/11/07 20:32:38
URL: http://www.nmt.edu/~shipman/soft/homepage.html