What do you understand by software engineering? If you ask this question to ten different people, you are sure to receive just as many different answers. The reason lies in the fact that this relatively young discipline has yet to develop a unified terminology or a generally accepted body of foundational knowledge. The gap between research and practice is also problematic, effectively blocking the rapid advancement of software engineering. As a result, many areas of software development still rely on methods that date back to the 1970s and are completely inadequate for modern software and hardware environments. This book aims to contribute to bridging this gap. It addresses the methodological foundations of current software development.