Analysis of software engineering principles from an engineering perspective

Software engineering has recently emerged as a new engineering field in a continuing evolution. Software engineering is a discipline whose aim is the production of high quality software, but lacks maturity compared to other traditional engineering fields. Traditional engineering fields have their own principles originating from physics, chemistry and mathematics. However, since the software engineering discipline is not based on natural laws, establishing a set of principles is more challenging. This research on the set of candidate fundamental principles will contribute to a better understanding and possibly, to the teaching of the principles of software engineering and it will help improve the content of the software engineering body of knowledge (SWEBOK) Guide from an engineering perspective. This research work investigated the issue of software engineering as an engineering discipline using Vincenti categories of engineering knowledge; identified engineering fundamental principles from a set of candidates; and finally investigated the lack of explicit and systematic descriptions of these principles and their application, as in the SWEBOK Guide. The two main research objectives are the identification of the fundamental principles of software engineering from the 34 candidates principles; and the description of operational guidelines for these principles, based on the content of the SWEBOK Guide. To achieve these objectives, the following research methodology was used. The main phases of this research methodology are: the analysis, from an engineering perspective, of software engineering and the set of 34 ftandamental principles candidates; the identification of the software engineering principles in the content of the SWEBOK Guide - ISO TR 19759; the description of the operational guidelines on the basis of the content of the SWEBOK Guide and aligned with the IEEE standard 1362-1998 Concept of Operations (ConOps) Document. The main outcome of this research study is the identification of a set of nine software engineering fundamental principles and the description of operational guidelines