CS 3302 (Introduction to Software Engineering) Winter, 1998

Administrative information

	Instructor	Teaching assistant
Name	Colin Potts	t.b.a.
Phone	894-5551	t.b.a.
Email	potts@cc	t.b.a.
Room	CoC 257	t.b.a.
Office hours	T2-3, Th 3-4 special cases	t.b.a.

Class times	TTh 4:30-6:00
Class venue	Boggs (Chemistry Bldg.), Room B6
Newsgroup	git.cc.class.3302
Text	Schach, S. Software Engineering with Java, Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998.

Course objectives

Software engineering is the discipline of designing useful and high-quality software-based products. The objectives of CS3302 are to introduce you to the professional techniques needed for the practice of sofware engineering. By the end of the course you will be able to demonstrate skills in the following:

Understanding, clarifying and documenting the requirements for a customer.
Planning and managing a project, including effort estimation, risk analysis, contingency planning, and re-planning if the schedule is not met.
Designing a software system at the architectural and detailed levels.
Communicating and justifying design decisions.
Reviewing and testing designs and implementations.

Software engineers work in an environment very different from computer science students:

Their "instructors" are professional customers or their own company's marketing staff.
Their "assignments" are ill-defined and constantly changing (and sometimes canceled midstream).
They are responsible for acquiring the tools they need to perform their professional tasks.
They have professional responsibilities to stand by the quality of their products. Their "grades" are pride in achievement and social responsibility, career success, follow-on business, avoidance of customer complaints and litigation.
They never work alone, so they have to be able to work in teams.
They often work on just some phases or technical aspects of a large project (e.g. porting an existing product, running test cases, developing the database interface, etc.) that is far too big for them to understand as a whole.
The products that they work may last for years or even decades.
They have to understand the problem domain in which their software will work even though they aren't specialists in it, and they are responsible for any misunderstandings.

The objectives of 3302 are therefore to introduce you gently to each of these facets of software engineering through a mixture of classroom teaching, classroom exercises, readings and team mini-projects. Unlike real software engineering or the Real-World Lab (CS 4301/2/3), you will not be thrown into an arbitrary mixture of these challenges, but you will be introduced to all of them to some extent during the course.

Prerequisites

I assume that you have taken the CS1501/1502 sequence and, preferably CS2403 (Concurrency). You therefore will have a working knowledge of computation principles, algorithm design and programming practice, models of concurrency, and Pascal or Java and C programming. There will be Java programming in the course, and you are responsible for the language details. The support for software engineering in Java (packages, exceptions, etc.) will be covered in the course.
For the benefit of those of you who are CMPE majors, I do not assume that you have taken CS1160(logic and discrete math.) or CS2390 (design and modeling), but the treatment of analysis, specification, design and verification may go too fast for you. See me if you want more information on these topics, which are covered thoroughly in those courses.

Course content

The syllabus, schedule and information about learning resources are available separately.

Frequently asked questions

Why are you here? Why should you care? How will you know if you're doing well or poorly? All these questions and more will eventually be answered in the 3302 FAQ.

Colin Potts

potts@cc.gatech.edu