Software Engineering Principles: A Survey and an Analysis

This study presents a survey and an analysis of the literature on software engineering principles. The literature survey, covering a period of thirty years, has come up with 14 different papers and books, which have proposed a total of 313 distinct principles for software engineering. Our analysis of these works is carried out based on a rigorous definition of the term 'principle' and on the identification a set of explicit criteria to assess whether or not any of the proposed principles qualify as fundamental principles of software engineering. The analytical approach makes it possible to arrive at a set of 24 candidate software engineering principles which all meet the required criteria.