The document discusses several key aspects of software and software engineering: 1. Software serves both as a product that transforms information and as a vehicle that delivers computing capabilities. It controls programs, enables communications, and helps build other software. 2. Software is more complex and difficult to develop than hardware but easier to modify and upgrade. Software costs are concentrated in design rather than production. 3. Software evolves and deteriorates over time unlike hardware, which wears out. Most software continues to be custom built despite a slow trend toward component-based construction. Maintaining and evolving legacy software poses challenges. 4. The document outlines several "laws" and myths regarding software evolution, management, customers, and practitioners

1. Chapter 1 Software and Software Engineering Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 6th edition by Roger S. Pressman

9. Software Complexity I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation . If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet. - Fred Brooks, “No Silver Bullet” http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/misc/Brooks/