Chapter 2. Basics of software engineering

Before talking any further about your specific project, let's look at some basic software engineering issues. How should you organize your effort and your time? How do big programs get written?

In this chapter we lay out some of the basic software engineering principles and tools that you need to carry out the goal of the course, which is to produce a fairly large and complete computer game program based on an existing object-oriented framework.

Software Engineering and Computer Games focuses on showing you how to carry out one particular kind of software project. We are not going to give you a complete or advanced treatment of the whole field of software engineering here. Rather than attempting a broad-based survey, we are out to give you the tools to carry out one kind of task in depth. And while discussing this task we'll also show you some things about the practice of object-oriented software engineering.

Hopefully the lessons you learn here will give you a better insight into the more theoretical principles of software engineering when you encounter them in some other context. If this chapter gives you an appetite to learn more about software engineering, consult some of the books suggested in the Introduction.