Software Engineering for Electronic Systems Designers

This book is based on the lecture notes prepared for the Vacation School on "Software Engineering for Electronic Systems Designers", organized by the Institution of Electrical Engineers, held at Southampton University in April 1989.

The objectives of the Vacation School were summarised by the Chairman of the Organizing Commitee, Professor A.C.

Davies in his preface on the lecture notes: The increased complexity of many modern electronic systems and their frequent dependence upon software for their functionality and performance, and, in many cases, the serious consequences that arise in the event of a software error, place an obligation upon their designers to use the best available techniques and tools in order to achieve acceptable levels of software quality and correctness.

Amateur approaches to software design that were often used in the past, and which were sometimes adequate for simple systems, are no longer appropriate or acceptable. The Vacation School is primarily aimed at professional engineers responsible for the design of such software-based systems, many of whom may have had no formal education in computing science or software engineering, and whose introduction to software may have been via simple assembly-language programming tasks and/or through programming desk-top computers in BASIC.

The School is intended to provide them with a foundation of software engineering principles and concepts in order to improve their professional skills and their ability to specify the required performance and achieve delivery of a satisfactory product within an acceptable cost and time.