ABSTRACT
This chapter provides technical overview of some topics from the field of software engineering. Software engineering was first introduced in the 1960s in an effort to treat more rigorously the often frustrating task of designing and developing computer programs. The principal goal of software engineering is to define, specify, and measure software qualities and to describe the principles that can be applied to achieve them. Reliability relates to a program’s trustworthiness or dependability. More formally reliability can be defined as the statistical probability that a program will continue to perform as expected over a period of time. Efficiency is a measure of how economically a system uses available resources. In software engineering efficiency is equated with performance, so the terms are considered equivalent. The maturity of an engineering field is characterized by the degree of reusability. The most important reason for promoting software reusability is that it reduces the cost of production.
