Engr 692-06: Special Topics in Engineering Science
(Software Families)
Fall 2007

Assignment #1
Due Thursday, 13 September, 8:00 a.m.

This is an individual assignment, which you must complete in accordance with the instructions given in the Professional Conduct and Assignments sections of the Syllabus .

Write a critique of ONE of the following papers (with which the instructor has provided you copies):

1. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. "No Silver Bullet--Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering," IEEE Computer, April 1987.
2. D. L. Parnas. "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, pp. 1053-1058, December 1972. (Chapter 7 of Software Fundamentals.)
3. D. L. Parnas. "On the Design and Development of Program Families," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-2, No. 1, pp. 1-9, March 1976. (Chapter 10 of Software Fundamentals.)
4. K. H. Britton, R. A. Parker, and D. L. Parnas. "A Procedure for Designing Abstract Interfaces for Device Interface Modules," Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 195-204, March 1981. (Chapter 15 of Software Fundamentals.)
5. D. L. Parnas. "Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-5, No. 1, pp. 128-138, March 1979. (Chapter 14 of Software Fundamentals.)
6. D. L. Parnas, P. C. Clements, and D. M. Weiss. "The Modular Structure of Complex Systems," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-11, No. 3, pp. 259-266, March 1985. (Chapter 16 of Software Fundamentals.)
7. D. Garlan, R. Allen, and J. Ockerbloom. "Architectural Mismatch: Why Reuse is So Hard," IEEE Software, Vol. 12, No. 6, November 1995.

Create your critique with a word processor (e.g., Microsoft Word) or text formatter (e.g., LaTeX). Use doublespacing and typical margins left, right, top, bottom (e.g., 1 inch or 1.5 inches). Use a font size of 10 or 11.

The paper should be approximately two pages in length and be written in grammatically correct English sentences with good paragraph structure. The writing should follow normally scholarly practices. That is, the words should be yours, not something you copied off the internet or out of a book or journal. Where you do use words from some source, use appropriate quotation marks and citations of your source.

Use the handouts the instructor gave you as suggestions on how to approach this assignment.

Your paper will be evaluated based both on its idea content and its English presentation.

When complete, turn in a printed paper to the professor on the due date. You likely will be asked to turn in an electronic copy on Blackboard, but that is not set up yet.

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