ON THIS PAGE:

Course Objectives

Prerequisites

Approach

Typical Text

Course Outline

Course Objectives
To teach the skills necessary for building a software product as a team.

Prerequisites
COMP 410 and 411 are hard prerequisites.

Approach
This is a project course supplemented with about 24 one-hour lectures. The essence of the course is the faculty-coached team project. Students in teams of (ideally) four spend three months bounding, scheduling, specifying, coding, debugging, system integrating, and documenting a substantial programming product. Code documentation, ambition, effort, teamwork, and accomplishment are graded. Technical skills and organization skills are both learned by lecture, by coaching, and by experience.

Typical Text
Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month
Parnas, Software Engineering Principles [notes]

Course Outline

How To:
• Organize Development Teams
• Write User-Oriented Specifications for Software Systems
• Estimate Effort
• Develop Schedules and Monitor Progress
• Decompose Systems into Modules
• Design Software for Extension and Contraction
• Design Error Handling into Software Systems
• Perform Systematic and Controlled System Integration and Testing
• Document Software
• Recover from Imminent Disaster