Software Engineering for Students A Programming Approach

86 Chapter 6 ■ Modularity
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Further reading
This is the paper that suggests the small capacity of the human brain when comprehending
a set of items as a complete whole: G. A. Miller, The magical number seven,
plus or minus two; limits on our capacity for processing information, The
Psychological Review, 63 (2) (March 1956), pp. 81–97.
This classic paper introduced the idea of information hiding: D.L. Parnas, On the criteria
to be used in decomposing systems into component modules, Communications
of ACM, 15 (December 1972), pp. 1053–8. This paper is reprinted in P. Freemen
and A.I. Wasserman, Tutorial on Software Design Techniques, IEEE, 4th edn, 1983.
This is the book that first introduced the ideas of coupling and cohesion. There is also
treatment of the issue of the optimal size of a component: E. Yourdon and Larry L.
Constantine, Structured Design, Prentice Hall, 1979.
This book gives a more recent presentation of the ideas of coupling and cohesion: M.
Page-Jones, The Practical Guide to Structured Systems Design, Yourdon Press, 1980.
One of the first books on design patterns (architectures) – general software structures
that can be applied to a whole number of software systems. The book also analyses
the different mechanisms available for connecting components: Mary Shaw and
David Garlan, Software Architecture: Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, Prentice
Hall, 1966.