Started On August 15, 2000
This is a modest effort to elucidate most of the important concepts of Software Engineering. Each concept is a separate file, called an entry. This approach let's us use view documents to present particular bodies of knowledge. You can write your own view documents, a handy form of knowledge reuse. All this exploits the View Entry Pattern. Later the entries may become XML data.
As you will see, many of these concepts are so high level they are applicable to more than software. This indicates they are foundational to any engineering endeavor.
A concept is not a physical thing, only a pointer. However we include some physical things in this compendium if they made an outstanding contribution to the field, such as people, books and programming languages.
Software Engineeering is a vast and difficult field to learn. The use of domain views and standardized concepts makes digesting it one nibble at a time more possible. The learning curve accelerates as you encounter more and more standard concepts you already know. Each known concept becomes an old friend as you use or encounter it again and again. As your circle of old friends grows, so does your mastery of Software Engineering. Thus the real power of this collection of concepts is it allows:
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View Consistency:
Different views of the same thing. |
Our plan is to average 2 or more high quality new entries per day, start using the entries in various documents by adopting the View Entry document style whenever possible and add entries as the need arises. The whole will grow organically and eventually reach a critical mass of usefulness, kinda like spontaneous combustion. :-) So far, progress is slow. :-()