Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

By : Brian Allbee, Nimesh Verma
Book Image

Hands-On Software Engineering with Python

By: Brian Allbee, Nimesh Verma

Overview of this book

Software Engineering is about more than just writing code—it includes a host of soft skills that apply to almost any development effort, no matter what the language, development methodology, or scope of the project. Being a senior developer all but requires awareness of how those skills, along with their expected technical counterparts, mesh together through a project's life cycle. This book walks you through that discovery by going over the entire life cycle of a multi-tier system and its related software projects. You'll see what happens before any development takes place, and what impact the decisions and designs made at each step have on the development process. The development of the entire project, over the course of several iterations based on real-world Agile iterations, will be executed, sometimes starting from nothing, in one of the fastest growing languages in the world—Python. Application of practices in Python will be laid out, along with a number of Python-specific capabilities that are often overlooked. Finally, the book will implement a high-performance computing solution, from first principles through complete foundation.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Programming versus Software Engineering

Data structure and flow

Between the two of them, basic use-case and business-process documentation may provide enough information to make the structure and flow of the data through the system obvious, or at least transparent enough that development won't need any additional information. The Refuel process we've been looking at probably falls into that category, but let's see what a data-flow diagram for it might look like anyway.

The data that's coming in (the Refuel Data in the flowchart) was defined earlier in Use Cases section, and at least some of the related data flow was also noted, but having some names to associate with those values, and knowing what types of value they are, will be helpful:

  • odometer: The current odometer reading (probably an <int> value)

  • fuel_quantity: The amount of fuel used to fill the truck (probably a <float> value...