Maciaszek L.A. and Liong B.L. (2005):
Practical Software Engineering
Addison Wesley, 864p.

This book has a history of iterative and incremental development. It has certainly undergone all four major phases of one popular lifecycle model - project: inception, elaboration, construction and transition. The book has been an agile development by a pair of authors, with user stories as requirements, with continuous integration and lots of refactoring, but unfortunately not with short cycles to delivery.

The inception of the book dates back to the 1990 publication of MACIASZEK, L.A. (1990): Database Design and Implementation, Prentice Hall, 383p. Many readers of that book requested a follow-up text with more complete case-studies, short and long examples, and with a stepwise (i.e. iterative and incremental) increase of technical difficulty and content sophistication. The business case for the book was made and the project entered the elaboration phase - the vision was refined, the risks resolved, the requirements and scope identified, but the target platform ended up to be. lots of industry training and consulting instead of a book.

Ten years later, and after countless industrial projects, the amount of practical material collected was screaming for publishing to wider audience. But the audience has changed - the industry entered the Internet age.  A new textbook was needed to define the prerequisite knowledge demanded by modern software engineering. That textbook was MACIASZEK, L.A. (2001): Requirements Analysis and System Design. Developing Information Systems with UML, Addison Wesley, 378p. - going into the 2^nd edition concurrently with this book. Soon after, the book you are holding entered the construction phase.

The construction phase was bumpy. Originally the book was perceived as a companion to Maciaszek's 2001 textbook or any similar book. Later the emphasis shifted to a stand-alone textbook that uses an iterative case-study approach to teaching practical software engineering. The book concentrates on software design, programming and management. It emphasizes modern development practices, methods, techniques, and tools.

The transition phase of this book is in your - the reader's hands. The beta-tests of this book were conducted in classrooms and on software projects. The deployment is at the reader's mercy. Please submit change requests, defects and enhancements to the development team.