Calendar Description

Theory and development of software systems. This course will discuss computer ethics. Possible topics include: software development processes, requirement specification, class and scenario modeling, state modeling, UML, design patterns, traceability. Students are to complete a team project using a CASE tool.

Assumed Background

Practical experience with rudimentary software design techniques
- able to take an assignment description and identify the objects that are required
- able to apply concepts of encapsulation to organize the required objects
- able to identify opportunities for code reuse and implement them
- able to apply advanced object-oriented programming concepts, including polymorphism and generic programming

Practical experience in designing, implementing, testing and documenting small to medium size object-oriented programming assignments

Learning Objectives

Understand the theory of large scale software system development
- recognize the need for using a formal development process
- learn the phases of object-oriented software development life cycle (requirements elicitation, analysis, high-level design, detailed design, implementation, testing)
- learn basics of project management

Gain the practical experience to:
- analyze a problem description for a large system
- apply each phase of the software development life cycle
- produce quality output for each phase

Prepare for a career as a software development professional:
- develop tools and strategies for working as a member of a team
- practice formal presentation of work to peers
- produce professional documentation
- understand the Software Engineering Code of Ethics; learn to identify and analyze ethical dilemmas in a systematic fashion

Topics

Software Development Life Cycle

Requirements elicitation
- able to extract functional and non-functional requirements from a problem description
- able to construct corresponding functional model, with UML use cases and scenarios
- able to incorporate traceability into every work product

Analysis
- able to identify high level objects and categorize them into entity, boundary and control objects
- able to construct corresponding object model, including associations (inheritance, aggregation), dependencies and multiplicity, with UML class diagrams
- able to construct a dynamic model based on functional requirements, with UML sequence diagrams, state machines and/or activity diagrams

High-level system design
- understand different types of architectural styles (repository, client/server, peer-to-peer, MVC)
- able to break down analysis object model into subsystems, with UML component diagrams
- able to identify subsystem services and interfaces

Detailed object design
- understand the need for code reuse
- understand major design patterns
- able to construct detailed object model

Implementation
- understand strategies for mapping models to code and to persistent storage

Testing
- unit testing:
  - be able to create test cases for blackbox and whitebox testing
- integration testing:
  - be able to select a testing integration strategy (top-down, bottom-up, sandwich)
  - be able to create test cases using stubs and drivers
- system testing:
  - be able to create test cases based on the functional model

Software Management

understand basic project management issues, including team organization and risk management

understand the need for software management processes and tools, including:
- configuration management
- version management
- system building
- release management

understand the different software development life cycle models (waterfall, V-model, spiral, Unified Software Development Process)

Professional Ethics

be familiar with the principles of the ACM Software Engineering Code of Ethics
be able to use a systematic process to analyze ethical dilemmas, determine possible courses of action, and select the most ethical course of action