Essentials of Software Engineering, 5th Edition

2.3 Coordination Efforts

The payroll example demonstrates the need for many of the software engineering activities. A critical concern for large, complex systems is the upward scaling of the needed process, of the design structure and contents of the product, and of the required personnel. In the opposite direction is the concern of downward scaling of the same parameters for simpler systems. In this section we will introduce these concerns. The details of process, product design, and personnel management will be discussed in later chapters.

2.3.1 Process

We have already discussed the notion of a process. As both applications and systems software became large and complex in the 1980s and 1990s, the number of serious and costly problems skyrocketed. ...