csc302h — engineering large software systems — winter 2014

required reading

much of the second half of this course is based on the book; The Agile Planning Horizon in Professional Software Development by Dr. David Penny. Dr. Penny was nice enough to grant us permission to use the first five chapters of his book in the course, free of charge!

the excerpt from the book can be downloaded here and is required reading for the remainder of the course.

schedule & slides

week	date	lecture slides	additional readings
week 1	tuesday, january 7th	lecture 0: introduction 4 per page 1 per page	Why Software Fails article in IEEE Spectrum, by Robert Charette Two Solitudes Illustrated by Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda NPfIT NHS IT disaster
	thursday, january 9th	lecture 1: modeling 4 per page 1 per page	object modeling language oml generations
week 2	tuesday, january 14th	lecture 2: software architecture 4 per page 1 per page	group work: coping with hitchhikers & couch potatoes Conway's law (optional) socio-technical congruence
	thursday, january 16th	lecture 3: reverse engineering & design discovery 4 per page 1 per page	design patterns & uml
week 3	tuesday, january 21st	lecture 4: sequence & use case diagrams 4 per page 1 per page	software architecture dicumentation in the real world. read slides 78-82 on the role of uml in modeling, and slides 111-118 on diagramming guidelines. this material will help you write your reports.
	thursday, january 23rd	lecture 5: software development lifecycle 4 per page 1 per page
week 4	tuesday, january 28th	lecture 6: risk management 4 per page 1 per page	the risks digest
	thursday, january 30th	lecture 7: requirements analysis 4 per page 1 per page	what are requirements? by Steve Easterbrook a tutorial on goal modeling, also by prof. Easterbrook
week 5	tuesday, february 4th	lecture 8: from requirements to design 4 per page 1 per page	goal modeling tutorial by Steve Easterbrook the law of demeter a brief guide to robustness diagrams
	thursday, february 6th	lecture 9: robustness analysis 4 per page 1 per page
week 6	tuesday, february 11th	lecture 10: verification & validation 4 per page 1 per page	goodbye world! a presentation by Jim Meyering, maintainer of gnu coreutils, shows that all software, even entrenched legacy stuff like streams in c, can benefit from robustness analysis, v&v, and proper testing.
	thursday, february 13th	lecture 11: introduction to testing 4 per page 1 per page
*** reading week ***
week 7	tuesday, february 25th	lecture 12: testing strategies 4 per page 1 per page	rubber duck debugging
	thursday, february 27th	lecture 13: automated testing 4 per page 1 per page	python documentation on unit testing. pyunit tutorial on sourceforge.
week 8	tuesday, march 4th	lecture 14: static analysis 4 per page 1 per page
	thursday, march 6th	lecture 15: quality 4 per page 1 per page	cmmi institute, just have a quick look. ISO 9126 explained.
week 9	tuesday, march 11th	lecture 16: software vendor environment 4 per page 1 per page	the management team, a post by Joel Sploski.
	thursday, march 13th	lecture 17: software development best practices 4 per page 1 per page
week 10	tuesday, march 18th	lecture 18: planning 4 per page 1 per page
	thursday, march 20th	lecture 19: planning, continued... 4 per page 1 per page
week 11	tuesday, march 25th	lecture 20: capacity constraint 4 per page 1 per page	painless software schedules — an old article by Joel Spolski. ignore the obsolete warning. after reading, read the article that obsoletes this one too. why we suck at estimates; an article by Dan Milstein.
	thursday, march 27th	lecture 21: effort estimation 4 per page 1 per page
week 12	tuesday, april 1st	lecture 22: buffer — in case we're running behind schedule
	thursday, april 3rd	lecture 23: course review