Course Summary
This is a course about the practice of programming,
which is more than just writing code, and software
engineering, which is more than just programming.
Professionals in the field must also assess tradeoffs,
choose among design alternatives, debug and test,
measure and improve performance, and maintain software
written by themselves and others. They must be concerned
with compatibility, robustness, and reliability, while
unfailingly meeting specifications.
There will be five programming assignments in the
first six weeks of the semester. These assignments will
be completed individually. Each will consist of
implementing a specification and developing a testing
apparatus to provide evidence that the implementation
matches the specification. During the second half of
the semester, students will work in groups of three to
five on a largely-unconstrained design project of their
choosing to complete a three-tier system addressing a
real-world application.
The practice of programming is not constrained to a
specific language, and neither is this course. The
course will assume that you are very familiar with C and
Java, and will include excursions into a variety of
languages from several language families. There will be
significant emphasis on tools, both how to use them and
how they are designed and built.
