CS350 Outline

Overview

This module introduces you to the course organization, policies, and mechanics. We’ll review the structure of the course website and give you an opportunity to get set up for the semester to come.

We’ll take a brief look at the major themes and areas of emphasis that you can expect to hear more about through the coming semester.

Objectives

1. Identify the requirements, protocols, and policies for the online course
2. Use the selected technology tools for communication and collaboration
3. Discuss the course themes and their relation to software development.

Relevance

An understanding of the tools used in an online course is fundamental in becoming a successful online learner. It is also important to identify the expectations for participation, assignment submission, and the time management skills required in the online format.

You can expect that professional software development will be quite different from typical academic programming assignments. This course will emphasize the tools and techniques that developers use on a daily basis, with an emphasis on automating best practices of software engineering.

Overview

Every development organization settles into a process that they use to produce new software. Although the component activities are largely the same, different processes place different levels of emphasis on the components and arrange those components differently.

We’ll look at the more common and the more influential models for software development processes and will examine the interaction between the development model and the organization and composition of development teams.

Objectives

1. Discuss the phases and component activities of software development
2. Assess the likely impact of popular software process development models on a project
3. Discuss common team organizations and roles in software development

Relevance

A development model establishes the context in which we can consider more specific best practices. At the same time, the more modern and trendy development models take for granted that team members will have a high level of familiarity with common best practices.

Overview

We will look at the processes of eliciting and analyzing requirements, and at common forms of documents for recording them. We will look at how these documents vary depending on whether we are doing requirements analysis “up front” or incrementally. We will discuss the characteristics that contribute to the quality of requirements statements.

Objectives

1. Recognize common forms of requirements documents
2. Discuss quality characteristics for requirements
3. Write a requirements document in an industry-standard format.

Relevance

All software development projects begin with a statement of requirements. All subsequent software construction must refer back to those requirements. It is therefore essential that all developers be able to read and understand requirements documents, even if they were not actively engaged in writing those documents.

Overview

Software construction is the term used for the development activities that follow requirements and lead up to the final system and acceptance tests. In this module, we will take a high-level look at the component activities of software construction and will discuss some of the critical decisions that need to be made at the start of construction.

Students will begin the process of building their personal development environment by installing and practicing with a modern IDE (Integrated Development Environment).

Objectives

1. Identify and discuss the constituent activities of software construction
2. Discuss issues associated with these activities
3. Review the contributions and features of IDEs in construction activities

Relevance

This module sets the stage for the exploration of more detailed construction topics to follow in the remainder of the course.

Overview

In this section we will review the basic principles of unit testing, and then we will look at the problem of automating the testing oracle, the procedure of determining when our code has passed or failed each test.

This will lead us to the world of modern Unit test frameworks, which seek to make running tests so effortless that there is no longer any excuse to defer testing.

On the cutting edge of testing practice, we will look at mock objects as a means of further automating our tests.

Objectives

1. Discuss the position of testing in an overall verification and validation context.
2. Discuss the varying scopes and goals of testing.
3. Discuss the activities comprising testing and the role of automation in supporting those activities.
4. Apply *Unit frameworks.
5. Discuss the use of mock objects in unit testing.
6. Apply the mutator/accessor strategy for ADT testing.
7. Apply the mutator/accessor strategy to write a JUnit test suite for a documented (and unimplemented) Java Class.
8. Discuss the benefits of Hamcrest style assertThat matchers over assertTrue, assertFalse, and assertEquals.
9. Briefly discuss how Unit Tests can be written in Python and Rust.

Relevance

Unit testing has always been seen as a critical part of software construction, but modern best practices place more emphasis on it than ever. “Test first” is a mantra in modern software development, and common practice integrates testing so tightly into the build process that it’s more trouble to avoid tests than to re-run them at each step.

Overview

Version control is concerned with managing the history of changes made to the software by the development team. A good version control system offers a team control over the history, exploration, and collaboration on a project. We’ll look at the issues and approaches to local, centralized, and distributed version control, and explore how to work with a distributed version control system from an IDE.

Objectives

1. Discuss the issues and problems involved in collaborative development of software

2. Discuss the major types of version control (local, centralized, and distributed) and how team conflicts are resolved in each

3. Discuss the concept of branches and their impact on software development strategy

4. Apply a distributed or centralized version control system

5. Manage a repository within a forge environment

Relevance

Version control has rescued many a project from utter disaster of having lost or destroyed critical code. Probably the only practice that has done so more often would be regular backups. But version control is also central to managing collaboration among team members, allowing confidence that developers working independently need not fear overwriting or interfering with one another’s work.

Overview

A build manager has the task of performing any automated steps required to rebuild a software project after programmers have made changes. We will look at the primary models for build management, file dependencies and task dependencies, and the most commonly used managers for each model. We’ll also look at how to replace an IDE’s built-in builder with a more flexible manager.

Objectives

1. Discuss the role of build managers in supporting a project
2. Discuss the limitations of the default build managers provided with IDEs
3. Discuss and assess the impact of the major forms of dependency management in builds
4. Apply a common file dependency manager (make) and task dependency manager (ant/maven/gradle)

Relevance

Modern projects now rely on build managers for much more than just the basic operations of compiling and linking. Build managers are also called upon to run tests, to prepare software packages for deployment, to deploy them, and to prepare project reports and post those reports to project web sites. These demands go far beyond the capabilities of the simple manager included in your IDE. Used properly, a build manger can save a team a lot of tedious work.

Overview

Software Configuration Management (SCM) addresses a wide variety of issues in the development of software. These include version control, studied earlier, but also the problems of coping with portability to multiple target platforms and the incorporation of externally developed code libraries into a project. We’ll explore these new issues of SCM and will look at how configuration management tools can aid in keeping all the components of a project compatible with one another.

Objectives

1. Discuss issues in supporting multiple target platforms
2. Discuss issues involved when incorporating 3rd party libraries as software components
3. Discuss the role of configuration management tools
4. Apply a common configuration management tool (maven/tvy)
5. Discuss the role of repositories

Relevance

With an increasingly rich universe of open-source and commercial libraries available, development teams are increasingly encouraged to avoid wasting effort by resolving problems already solved by someone else. Discovery of useful libraries can be difficult, however, and the possibility that a useful library may itself incorporate still other libraries raises the very real problem of inconsistency among a project’s components.

Overview

In this module, we will review some of the basic lessons on source code documentation that you may have learned as beginning programmers and will consider how well they translate to more professional practice. In accord with current best practice, we will look more closely at API documentation and the tools for building and maintaining that documentation. We will also look at some common project reports and how they might be posted to a project website.

Objectives

1. Discuss forms and roles of code documentation
2. Discuss common API documentation tools
3. Apply a common API documentation generator (Javadoc/Doxygen)

Relevance

Modern practice places far less emphasis on source code documentation than beginning programmers are often led to believe. At the same time, developers are commonly expected to conform to a higher standard in preparing API documentation and project reports.

Overview

This module will examine some of the validation tools that lie outside the realm of testing, including analysis for dead code, for overly complex code, and for violation of coding standards and practices.

Also, with our now content-rich, automated builds, we will examine the practice of continuous integration as a means of keeping project status information up to date.

Objectives

1. Discuss the differences between dynamic and static analysis
2. Apply code coverage tools
3. Apply static code analysis tools and interpret their results
4. Apply a continuous integration framework to manage report generation.

Relevance

Many clients require the use of code analysis tools on delivered code, treating the reports from these tools as part of the acceptance test for the system. Developers need to understand both the abilities and limitations of the analysis performed by these tools. With so many reports being produced by projects, automating not just the build but the launching of new builds is an increasingly common practice.

Overview

System testing often involves inputs that are hard to supply or outputs that are hard to capture (e.g., graphics on a screen). Some regression tests can face the same problem. We’ll examine the possibilities of automating tests at this level to a degree similar to what we achieved earlier with unit testing.

Objectives

1. Discuss problems introduced when testing at the system level
2. Discuss tools for testing GUI code
3. Discuss the role of bug/issue tracking in a development process
4. Apply an issue tracking system in a team project

Relevance

The rise of GUI interfaces as the most common way for users to interact with programs created a huge problem for system testing that, decades later, is still a source of difficulty for development teams. Developers need to know what can be done automatically about this and how they can design or plan around the problems when automated solutions are unworkable.

Overview

Agile development is a set of practices centered on an incremental development model. Agile methods are threatening to topple the Waterfall as the most commonly used development process model.

We will explore the principles and practices that comprise agile development. We will see how many of the practices studied in the earlier modules lie at the heart of agile practice. We will look at some of the primary development models within the agile movement.

Objectives

1. Discuss the conflict between incremental and “up front” models
2. Assess the impact of incremental models on a development project
3. Discuss the philosophy and components of agile models
4. Discuss the impact of agile models and requirements elicitation

Relevance

Agile development is not only a set of development practices and process models, but also a social/political movement in the world of software development.

The Agile Manifesto calls for non-technical managers to properly respect software developers by adopting a hands-off attitude to technical decisions. This call would be unforgivably arrogant if the Manifesto did not also call for developers to demonstrate their professionalism by knowing and adopting the profession’s best practices, independent of any mandates from management requiring them to do so.

Overview

This semester we focused on Java. However, the TDD process and tools we discussed are not unique to Java. If we look at Python and Rust we can find unit testing frameworks, analysis tools, configuration management, and even Hamcrest Matchers.

This module will revisit selected previous topics, but in Python (and Rust). This module is meant as a Future Work module. Everything covered in this module is meant for perspective, or a guide on where to start in other languages (e.g., Python or Rust).

You will not be required to write Python or Rust code on the Final Exam.