PhD Research On Software Design Principles?

cconnell writes "I am working on a PhD in software engineering at Tufts University. My interest are the general principles of good software design, and I am looking for links/references on this topic. The question is: What design/architecture qualities are shared by all good software? Good software means lacking in bugs, maintainable, modifiable, scalable, etc... Please don't tell me 'use object oriented methods' or 'try extreme programming.' These answers are too narrow, since there is good software written in COBOL, and by 1000-person teams for DoD projects. I am looking for general design principles. If it helps, I am trying to build on the ideas in this article from some years back."

Comments

Documentation

[morgan_greywolf]

A software project is only as good its documentation. Look at successful open source projects -- many of these have excellent project documentation that tells you all about the architecture, structure, features, coding practices, standards implemented, data formats, data validation information and so forth.

WHat kills so many projects is a lack of good documentation -- if no one can figure out how to pick up the ball and code a feature or a bugfix or whatever, then the code will wither. This applies even to closed source projects -- one of the things that screwed Vista over, for instance is that much legacy code was in need of rewrite -- except there no one new what the code did anymore.

Re:Value of a PhD from Tufts?

[cconnell]

1) I do have a starting point. See the article I linked to in my OP.

2) I am doing separate literature searches, in various ways. I also wanted to get input from practitioners in the field, since much good work in software engineering does not come from the academic community.

Chuck Connell