AI Assisted Software Engineering

From the preface

This book began with a catalog description.

In the fall of 2026 I was preparing to teach a graduate course in software engineering. The catalog description had not changed in years. It promised students "software life cycle models; size estimation; cost and schedule estimation; project management; risk management; formal technical reviews; analysis, design, coding and testing methods; configuration management and change control; and software reliability estimation." It is a good list. It is also, word for word, the description another university uses for its own graduate course, and it would have been at home in a catalog from 1995.

My students would not be working in 1995. Most of them would start their next jobs one to four years after the course ended, on teams where coding agents write much of the code. So before I wrote a syllabus I went looking for how other people were teaching the same course now.

Contents

Front matter: Preface · Acknowledgments · How to Use This Book.

1. Part I. Foundations
   1. The Coordination Problem, 1968 to Now
   2. The Assumption Audit: A Method That Outlasts the Tools
2. Part II. The Life Cycle, Audited
   3. Life-Cycle Models When Iteration Is Cheap
   4. Requirements as the Primary Artifact
   5. Size Estimation: What Function Points Still Measure
   6. Cost and Schedule Estimation After COCOMO
   7. Project Management and Where Value Is Earned
   8. Coordination at Scale: Shared Context vs. Shared Messages
   9. Risk Management: Project Risk and Adversarial Risk
   10. Design for Change, and for Agents
   11. Construction When Code Is Cheap
   12. Reviews: Inspecting Evidence, Not Diffs
   13. Testing, Evaluation, and Tests as Steering
   14. Configuration Management When Agents Commit
   15. Reliability of Nondeterministic Systems
3. Part III. Agent Teams
   16. Roles and the Four Conditions for Assurance
   17. Coordination Without Communication: The Bound and the Leak Test
4. Part IV. Practice
   18. Running the Whole Life Cycle: The Engineer as Manager of an Agent Team

Back matter: Appendix A, The Assumption Audit: Quick Reference · B, Work-Log Template · C, Handoff-Package Template · D, Two-Part Risk-Register Template · E, Estimation Worksheet · F, Evidence-Package Template · G, Labs and Milestones at a Glance · H, Claim-to-Evidence Ledger · Glossary · Bibliography · Index.

The book's sibling is AI Assisted C and C++ Programming by the same author.