csc444h — software engineering I — fall 2015

required reading

much of the 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 his book free of charge!

the book can be downloaded here.

schedule & slides

lecture	slides	additional readings
week 1, september 15^th	lecture 0a: introduction — 1pp, 4pp lecture 0b: top-10 — 1pp, 4pp	Why Software Fails article in IEEE Spectrum, by Robert Charette Two Solitudes Illustrated by Greg Wilson and Jorge Aranda NPfIT NHS IT disaster
week 2, september 22^nd	lecture 1a: software company — 1pp, 4pp lecture 1b: modeling — 1pp, 4pp	group work: coping with hitchhikers & couch potatoes object modeling language oml generations
week 3, september 29^th	lecture 2: software architecture — 1pp, 4pp	design patterns & uml (optional) socio-technical congruence design patterns book wikipedia page. also has links to individual patterns
week 4, october 6^th	lecture 3a: use case & sequence diagrams — 1pp, 4pp lecture 3b: reverse engineering — 1pp, 4pp	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.
week 5, october 13^th	lecture 4: software development lifecycle — 1pp, 4pp	an interesting, obsolete article by Joel Spolsky on software scheduling and process. read the non-obsolete one after. agile software process and software rot.
week 6, october 20^th	lecture 5: planning — 1pp, 4pp	Joel Spolski's top-12.
week 7, october 27^th	* MIDTERM TEST * lecture 6: capacity constraint — 1pp, 4pp	painless software schedules — an old article by Joel Spolski. ignore the obsolete warning. after reading, read the article that obsoletes this one too.
week 8, november 3^rd	lecture 7a: risk — 1pp, 4pp lecture 7b: releases & versions — 1pp, 4pp	the risks digest.
week 9, november 10^th	lecture 8: requirements analysis — 1pp, 4pp	what are requirements? by prof. Steve Easterbrook.
week 10, november 17^th	lecture 9: defect & feature tracking — 1pp, 4pp	my supplemental material on burndown charts Alistair Cockburn's guide to burndown charts
week 11, november 24^th	lecture 10: testing — 1pp, 4pp	this one's a little weird: rubber duck debugging 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.
week 12, december 1^st	lecture 11: estimation — 1pp, 4pp	why we suck at estimates; an article by Dan Milstein.
week 13, december 8^th	* GROUP PRESENTATIONS * lecture 12: course summary — 1pp, 4pp