Software Engineering (Software Methodology 1)

News

Week of 4 Decemnber (Finals Week)

Please fill out a [group member evaluation] and bring it to the final exam.

The three exam times we agreed on are Monday 6-8, Tuesday 10-12, and the regular scheduled final exam time on Thursday. It looks like we can use conference rooms in Deschutes for the two alternate times. (The regular exam on Thursday will be in our classroom in Deady.)

If you have a key to the upper floors of Deschutes, you can meet near my office (room 239). I'll make a couple of forays downstairs to pick up anyone who is stuck there or outside the main front door, but don't be too late.

[Old news]

Overview

This is a project-oriented course on software engineering. You will work as teams to construct software systems, including not only programs but also end-user documentation, maintenance guides, etc. You will also be expected to think about principles and issues in software engineering, to read and respond to papers, and to participate in class discussions.

No university course can substitute for years of real-world experience, and that is not the objective of this course. Rather, the objective is to prepare you to learn from that experience. Thus our focus is first on broad principles and issues that pervade software engineering. Because these principles and issues are fundamental, they appear again and again even as popular methods and tools shift. Yesterday we had structured development, today we have object-oriented development, tomorrow we can expect something else ... but the fundamental challenges of teamwork, complexity, change and variation have been with us from the beginning and will be with us for the forseeable future.

Rough Schedule

Project 1 (4 weeks): The first project is assigned by the instructor, and teams are also assigned by the instructor. Unless someone is ready with a really compelling alternative, I will ask you to produce a system for finding good LTD bus routes from one place to another.

Note: Because Thanksgiving eats half of week 9, we are going to have to cut the schedule a bit for both projects, and instead of four full weeks, you will have only about 3.5 weeks for this first project. It will be due on Wednesday, October 18.

Project 2 (4.5 weeks): The second project is selected by each student team, and the teams are also self-chosen. Projects are due at the end of week 9, but since that is the week of Thanksgiving, projects will be due Wednesday of that week (24 November) at noon. The final week of classes is used for in-class demonstrations and discussions.

I will be out of town (at the ACM Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering) November 5-11.

Here is a more complete schedule.

Here are a few ideas for 2nd projects:

• Group mail fingerprint service. Let a group of people determine whether others in the group received the same email message. or email from the same person, without sharing the content of the email. Answer the question "is this message just to me, or did others in my group also receive it?". (Similar to spam detection, on a small scale.)
• Games. A popular choice for 422/522. Caveat: my standards are pretty high, and it's a lot of work to build a game that people actually want to play. Think carefully whether you are ready to take on that challenge and commit to that much work.

There will be a midterm and a final exam, largely on lecture topics and readings.

Lecture Notes

Lecture notes from Fall 2006

The rest are lecture notes from an earlier class. They may be replaced or augmented with new versions as the term progresses.

CVS rough guide | Notes on Teamwork | Introduction to Design

User Manuals| Performance | Koala (Component Architecture)

Textbook and Readings

No textbook

I am not entirely certain this is the right decision, but this term I'm going to assign readings of papers (and some online sources) but no traditional textbook at all. If you feel uncomfortable not having a book, here are some choices that I considered assigning, with comments.

• Ghezzi, Jazayeri, and Mandrioli, Fundamentals of Software Engineering, 2nd edition.
  I like this book quite a lot, but when I used the first edition in a class, I found it hard to coordinate reading order with the topics I needed to cover in a project-oriented course. That's particularly an issue when we try to cram two projects into a 10-week academic term. Nonetheless I may give the new edition a try next term. Order of presentation is less of an issue after you have studied the topic, so this might be a fine volume for your bookshelf if you'd like a good, coherent reference.
• van Vliet, Software Engineering: Principles and Practice, 2nd edition.
  The organization of this book is more conventional, and overall I like it ... but in recent offerings of 422 when this book was used, student comments were not very positive.
• Sommerville, Software Engineering, gazillionth edition.
  This is by far the most widely used textbook in undergraduate software engineering courses. On the positive side, it hits all the standard software engineering course topics, in a pretty reasonable order. Quality of the coverage varies by topic, but you could say that about any of the available books. I thought some of the editions a few years back were a mile wide and an inch deep, but some of the weaker sections have definitely improved over time. It's a reasonable choice, though not my first choice.
• Others. There are a bunch more software engineering textbooks available. Some are really awful (I won't name names here, but I'll be glad to show you some I hate and tell you why), and some are fine but just not a good fit for this course.

Readings

The papers we are reading are primarily in the first half of the term. The schedule, along with links to the papers, are here.

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