Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) v4.0 is out [pdf]

It's so unfortunate that this effort is still alive. The ACM canceled its involvement for excellent reasons which are worth reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20000815071233/http://www.acm.or...

It's probably also worth reading Dijkstra's assessment of the "software engineering" field (roughly coextensive with what the SWEBOK attempts to cover) from EWD1036, 36 years ago.

> Software engineering, of course, presents itself as another worthy cause, but that is eyewash: if you carefully read its literature and analyse what its devotees actually do, you will discover that software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot.".

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF

The ACM's criticisms, however, are much harsher and much more closely focused on the ill-conceived SWEBOK project.

The IEEE's continued involvement calls the IEEE's own credibility and integrity into question—as do its continued opposition to open-access publishing and its recent history of publishing embarrassingly incompetent technical misinformation in IEEE Spectrum (cf., e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41593788, though there are many other examples). What is going on at IEEE?

Any suggestion for a handbook or compendium that you consider to be a worthy alternative?

The thing here is, this reads like a prissy textbook that no-one can really disagree with but is still not gripping the reality. More HR handbook than blood-red manual.

For example, project management. The book covers this but does the usual wrong headed way of imagining there are executives with clear eyed Vision and lay down directives.

This is of course not how most projects in most companies are started. It’s a mess - reality impinges on the organisation, pain and loss and frustration result in people making fixes and adjustments. Some tactical fixes are put in place, covered by “business as usual”, usually more than one enthusiastic manager thinks their solution will be the best, and a mixture of politics and pragmatism results in a competition to be the one project that will solve the problem and get the blessed budget. By the time there is an official project plan, two implementations exist already, enough lessons learnt that the problem is easily solved, but with sufficient funding all that will be abandoned and have to be rebuilt from scratch - and at a furious pace to meet unrealistic expectations that corners will be cut leading …

That manual needs to be written.