Software Engineering Papers

Question

Please recommend me software engineering/methodology/practices paper. So far I have enjoyed:

• Dijkstra : Go To Statement Considered Harmful (1968)

• Nikalus Wirth : Program Development by Stepwise Refinement

• David Parnas : Information Distribution Aspects of Design Methodology (1971)

• Liskov : Design Methodology for Reliable Software Systems (1972)

• Extensible Language : Schuman and P Jourrand R. Balzer

• Structured Programming : Dahl - Hierarchical Program

• Jim Morris Protection in Programming Languages (1971)

• Bill Wulf and Mary Shaw Global Variable Considered Harmful (1973)

• Lisko and Zilles : ADTs (1974)

Answer 1

Methodologies

The Agile Method and Other Fairy Tales

Answer 2

James Neighbors: "The Draco approach to producing Software from Reusable components" This is the source of the term "Domain Analysis".

I note that you are reading papers from the 1970s. It would be nice if far more of the community would do that:

1) They're great papers.

2) They cover a lot of the ground that current methodologies cover now, without the fractal complications.

3) There's a lot fewer of them; you can get a great education by reading literally everything published from 1965 to 1980.

(The Draco paper cited is 1983, but the PhD thesis from which is derived is dated 1980)

(Full disclosure: I was a graduate student during Neighbor's stint at UC Irvine, and his ideas have completely contaminated my brain, outlook, and the kinds of tools I now build).

Answer 3

The New Methodology by Martin Fowler.

Is Design Dead by Martin Fowler.

Answer 4

Alistair Cockburn: Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development

Answer 5

I would advice you to follow IEEE Software and/or some of the publications of the ACM. Once there you will start to recognize your favorite authors and then search for their other articles.

ACM Queue is a good source of free and great content. Also a must read list is the IEEE Software's 25th-Anniversary

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/software/toppicks

If you liked those articles, you could also find related articles from Google Scholar or look for other articles quoting those within publication networks (acm, citeseer, etc...)

Answer 6

• "1965. P.J.Landin The next 700 programming languages" - How functional programming has started & evolved

• "1960. John McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine, Part I" McCarthy presented Lisp in this article & I really enjoy the description of garbage collection implementation to realize than not much has changed since then.

• "2000. Laurie A. Williams All I really need to know about pair programming I learned in kindergarten" The best at least for me explanation of XP practices in a nutshell.

Answer 7

Not a paper but a short book (well it originally WAS a paper) written by Eric Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar. This book is relevant because it talks about the differences between open and closed source projects. It has some random tidbits in it as well.

Answer 8

Butler W. Lampson - Hints for Computer System Design (PDF)

(Non-PDF link here)

Answer 9

• D.L Parnas: On the Criteria To Be Used on Decomposing Systems into Modules
• Martin Fowler: Is Design Dead?
• Martin Folwer: Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern

Since you're so interested on fundamental software engineering papers may I recommend

Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers by David L. Parnas

Answer 10

The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

Answer 11

I really enjoyed "Streamed Lines: Branching Patterns for Parallel Software Development". I found it extremely useful for understanding some best-practices in dealing with the engineering experience - particularly with larger teams and multiple development initiatives. I don't know if that counts towards your goal but I thought I'd mention it regardless.

Answer 12

Here is the same thread on Reddit, you can find some very nice suggestions there.

Answer 13

One of my all time favorites is

D L Parnas & P C Clements, A rational design process: how and why to fake it

While it is dated, the fundamental point - design is not a rational process, but that pretending that it is can be useful - is as relevant as ever.

Answer 14

Eric A. Meyer, “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

The title says it all.

Answer 15

I suggest to read about Formal Method, There are many organizations to accept paper and a bunch of them call for paper.

What IS Formal Method

Persons on Formal Method

Call for paper example

Answer 16

Two of the recent papers related to programming I read are from Dijkstra

• On the Interplay Between Mathematics and Programming - E. W. Dijkstra
• The Humble Programmer - E. W. Dijkstra

Answer 17

A great one is Fred Brooks' Essence and Accidents in Software Engineering, which appeared in IEEE Computer in April 1987 and also in the second edition of his Mythical Man-Month.

Brooks explored why we hadn't seen the sort of exponential productivity improvement in software engineering as we had in chip speeds. He argued that it was because while we were making progress in reducing the "accidental complexity" of software development, there was still the "essential complexity" of having to carefully work out and specify the requirements of every software system. No amount of tooling or language design could significantly reduce essential complexity, at least in the "next decade".

I think his observations have mainly held true over the last quarter century. We have more productive languages, reusable frameworks, great IDEs, etc. but these all attack accidental complexity, not so much essential complexity.

For a 1995 critique of Brook's argument, see No Silver Bullet Revisted by Brad Cox (one of the two guys who invented Objective-C).

Answer 18

Roy Thomas Fielding's doctoral dissertation Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures [PDF] from 2000.

HTML version of the dissertation.

Answer 19

I like Robert Martin's series of articles in the C++ Report. They present simple but key OOD principles.

• The open-closed principle
• The Liskov substitution principle paper and its Wikipedia entry
• The Dependency Inversion Principle

On a similar note, Designing Reusable Classes presents a set of OO design heuristics, predating the work on patterns and heuristics in the 90's

I enjoyed these papers while learning OO