General Information
Below are the modules that comprise the course content.
Each module consists of a series of activities.
Not every assigned activity requires you to submit something for grading. Nonetheless, you are expected to do them all.
If no due date is specified, you are supposed to complete the assigned activity by the end of the final day allotted for that entire module.
Where a due date is given with no time, you have the entire day (until 11:59:59PM ET of the due date).
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
Relevance A development model establishes the context in which we can consider more specific best practices. Older models are still is use for large projects, while more modern agile models dominate small to medium scale projects. | Activities Getting started
Software Development Process Models
Tools
In Your Recitation Section
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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
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. | Activities Eliciting and Writing Requirements
Tools
In your recitation section
At the end of the week
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Overview Design begins with the process of decomposing a system into modules. We will focus on incremental development, and therefore incremental design, in this course. But incremental design is possible only if all team members understand the principles of good design and share a common high-level vision of the product. User stories are a simple technique of breaking down the work required to implement a large project. They emphasize decomposing the functionality desired by the end users into small pieces. As a project progresses, the list of stories becomes a major tool in planning each increment and tracking the team’s progress. Objectives
Relevance | Activities Design
Stories: Organizing Incremental Construction
Tools In Your Recitation Section
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Overview Your prior CS classes focused primarily on getting the code working. But there is such a thing as good code and bad code, even among code that “works”. At its simplest level, good code is easier to read than bad code. Refactoring is the process of making changes to code that do not affect the code’s behavior (i.e., whether it “works”) but that make the code better, in the sense that it is more readable and/or more easily maintained. Objectives
Relevance It is widely accepted that programmers spend far more time reading code than writing it. On a team project, we can safely assume that programmers will also need to spend a lot of time reading other people’s code. Part of being a good team member, then, is making sure that your peers can read your code and understand it. This can be achieved by a combinations of writing it “cleaner” to start with and of refactoring it later. | Activities Tools
Clean Coding
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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
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. | Activities V&V
Self-Checking Test Drivers
Stubbing and Mocking
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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
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. | Activities
Version Control
Tools
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Overview Software testing was, until nearly the end of the 20th century, treated as a necessary evil to be completed after the creative work of designing and writing the production code had been completed. Modern practice turns this around, developing the tests before the production code. In this module, we will look at
Objectives
Relevance TFD and TDD both lead to better testing practices. By encouraging developers to think about test cases early, the developers often avoid introducing faults into the production code. By writing unit tests as scenarios for the use of an interface, developers can see flaws or missing components that would prevent the interface from being useful. | Activities
Exam
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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
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. | Activities
(Optional) Ant & Maven In Detail |
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
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. | Activities Configuration Management
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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
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. | Activities
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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. 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. We will look at the use of cloud computing resources in conjunction with continuous integration. Objectives
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. | Activities
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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
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. | Activities
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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
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. | Activities
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Overview What happens after the developers (think that they) are done? Operations covers deployment of a software application to server machines, running the application and monitoring its performance, tuning the performance, and recovering from failures/crashes. Modern forms of operations rely heavily on remote servers, often provided as cloud services, and on virtualization and containers. Objectives
Relevance The DevOps movement is a response to stress imposed on operations by the short release cycles championed by agile development. It calls for close cooperation between developers and operations staff, making it imperative that developers understand the fundamentals of operations. | Activities
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Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4
Phase 5
All times in this schedule are given in Eastern Time.
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