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Engineering Software Products: Notes for Instructors
I have designed this book for an introductory, single-semester, course in software engineering. As I said the
book’s preface, my motivation was to write about the type of software that students can relate to and, hopefully,
will therefore be more motivated to learn about software engineering methods and techniques. Unfortunately,
the hype about ‘coding’ from politicians and the press, gives students the impression is that all they need to do
is to learn to program to develop high-quality products. I wanted to give instructors the material to help them
address this misconception.
The content and style of introductory courses in software engineering varies enormously depending on the
background of students, the differing philosophies underlying computer science courses, the personal interests
of instructors and other course options. Given this, it would be presumptuous for me to take a course as I would
present it and say ‘this is the way to teach introductory software engineering’. However, I think there are some
essentials for all courses:
1. Courses have to be supported by practical project work. In my view, this should always be small-group
projects but I know there are assessment issues with this approach. However, if you want to try and replicate
I have designed the material in this book around a 1 semester course with, theoretically, 1 chapter topic covered
1. Broad coverage. In this approach, you design the course to cover all material but you leave out sections of
2. Breadth with deep dives. This is my preferred approach where I aim to cover everything but some topics are
3. Selective coverage. In this approach, you deliberately leave out some chapters and cover the remaining
topics in more detail, using all of the material in the chapter plus additional reading. Therefore, you might
decide to focus on a programming-oriented course so that your emphasis is on Chapters 2, 4, 8, 9, and 10.
To accommodate these different approaches, the chapters are organized so that the sections are not very tightly
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If you would like to start afresh with your own material, I have also made available the diagrams and tables in
the book. You may use some or all of these as the skeleton of your presentation and build around them. The
diagrams were created in Adobe Illustrator but the original source is not available.
