Guide to the
Software Engineering
Body of Knowledge

2004 SWEBOK Guide - Strawman Phase

The objectives of the Strawman phase are to define the strategy, to deliver what is referred to as the Strawman version of the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge and to gather momentum in the profession for the project. The Strawman version was published in September 1998.

The main goal of this initial report is to propose a draft list of Knowledge Areas for the Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). This report also proposes a draft list of the disciplines that interact with software engineering. As its name implies, this Strawman version is intended to be challenged and to stimulate a vigorous debate.

Knowledge Areas are the major components of a discipline, or sub-fields of study. Related Disciplines are the other disciplines with which software engineering has a non-empty intersection or shares a common boundary.

In order to propose Knowledge Areas and Related Disciplines for "generally accepted" knowledge and to do so based on recognized, public and verifiable sources of information, it was decided that the tables of contents of general software engineering textbooks, the curricula of undergraduate and graduate programs in software engineering and the admission criteria for graduate programs would constitute the input to our analysis. A total of 24 textbooks and 29 programs were examined.

For the purposes of this Strawman version, a potential knowledge area had to be mentioned in the table of contents of at least one quarter of the textbooks sampled to qualify as a proposed Knowledge Area. The ISO/IEC 12207 standard on Software Life Cycle Processes is used as the basis and vocabulary for the classification of the different topics related to the life cycle. A number of other topics not related to the lifecycle were also considered.

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