April 6, 2011

Three Software Engineering Papers You Should Read Over And Over Again

* No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering. Frederick Brooks, 1986.
To remember that "building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet."

* On the Criteria to Decompose Systems Into Modules. David Parnas, 1972.
To remember that "modules should be considered to be a responsibility assignment rather than a subprogram."

* A Note on Distributing Computing. Jim Waldo et al., 1994.
To remember that "there are fundamental differences between the interactions of distributed objects and the interactions of non-distributed objects."