CS446 - Tools and Processes for Software

Autumn 1999 Monday, Wednesday: 3:15 - 4:30, place not yet known

This page is under construction and subject to changes!

Schedule (plus slides for some of the talks)

Sign up

If you want to participate in this class, please send an email to cs446@db.stanford.edu with your name as subject and with the body containing your email address, your department, degree pursuing, if you take the class for credits and for how many credits. If you have prior knowledge or experience with UML, other modeling techniques or design patterns, or have taken other classes about software engineering, please note that down as well.

News about CS446

none so far

Instructors

	Gio Wiederhold	Dorothea Beringer
mail	gio@cs.stanford.edu	beringer@db.stanford.edu
Office	Gates 433	Gates 418
Office Hours	By appointment through Marianne Siroker (siroker@cs).	Tuesday 4:00 to 5:00 Friday 11:00 to 12:00

Course Description

CS446 course has a two-fold goal. Our first goal is to give you an overview of the most important elements of software engineering. We will not be able to expand on the various topics in depth, but we will give you the necessary foundation for further studies in specific topics of software engineering during your career in software engineering. In the first part of the course we will talk about what makes up the discipline of software engineering and how the various elements relate to each other, we will give an overview on life-cycle models, the basic phases in a software development project, the use of quality assurance and metrics, software cost estimation, risk management, reuse, component oriented software development.

The second goal is to introduce you to the modeling technique UML and to the use of design patterns.

Prerequisites

This course is primarily for graduate students and it requires some prior experience in developing software in order to facilitate the understanding why processes and tools are needed in larger software projects. Knowing object-oriented programming and either Java or C++ is strongly encouraged, the assignments require the knowledge of the basic object-oriented concepts (classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, composition).

Credits

Three units for the whole course.
One unit for the classes about UML and software development methodologies, reading about UML, and the assignments about UML and Reverse Engineering.
There will be no final. The grades will be based on the assignments (assignments 1-3 is one third, assignment 4 is one third, assignment 5 and 6 is one third) and class participation

Mandatory Reading

The following two books are mandatory for taking this class:

"UML distilled", by Martin Fowler, 1997 (contains just the essentials, good introduction), "UML Toolkit", by Eriksson and Penker, 1998 (more in depth), "Using UML", by R. Pooley and P.Stevens, 1999, or another UML book covering the basic UML notations and preferably also the Unified Process
"Design Patterns", by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides, 1994 (this is a high quality and the classic book about design patterns), or "Patterns in Java, Volume 1" by Mark Grand, 1998 (contains all of the GoF design patterns and applies them to Java)

The following papers have to be read as preparation for certain classes:

"No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering", for Sept. 27
"The Mythical Man-Month", "Software Engineering Project Management", for Oct. 13
"Software Cost Estimation", "COCOMO 2.0", for lecture on software cost estimation
"A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement", for Oct. 4 (rb) ???
"Risk Management for Software Development", for lecture on Risk Management
more to come.....

Optional Reading

The Mythical Man Month, by Brooks: a short and very entertaining book containing many lessons still true nowadays about a large, complex software project - a classic book every computer scientist should have read
Software Architecture : Perspectives on an Emerging Discipline, by Mary Shaw, Garlan David, David Garlan
Pattern Oriented Software Architecture : A System of Patterns, by Frank Buschmann et. al
Software Engineering - A Holistic View, by Bruce I. Blum
Software Engineering - A Practitioner's Approach, by Roger S. Pressman
Software Engineering, by Ian Sommerville

Assignments

The assignments differ heavily in the amount of time required, and some of the assignments (e.g. reading project) have to be started early in the course and in parallel to the other assignments in order to get a good result. It is up to you to plan your assignment work so you can finish them in time.

Put your assignments either into the box in front of the office Gates 418 before 3pm, or bring them to the class.

Reading

see Mandatory Reading, you need the reading for the other assignments, so I recommend you to read the UML book in week 2 and 3, and to read the Design Pattern book in week 5 and 6.

Modeling with UML

Assignment 1: Actors and Use Cases, Domain Model, week 2 (due Oct. 4, 3:15pm)
Assignment 2: Design Model and Interaction diagrams, week 4 (due Oct. 18, 3:15pm)

Reverse Engineering

Assignment 3: Given a small software package and an incomplete use case model, make the interaction diagrams, the class diagram, a state chart, and try to model two additional features, week 5 (due Oct. 25, 3:15 pm)

Design Patterns

Assignment 4:

Reading credit card information: use design patterns
EBook: redesign by applying design patterns
Minesweeper: model the minesweeper and detect what design patterns you have used
week 6 to 8 (due Nov. 15, 3:15 pm)

Reading project

In this project you choose yourselves 3 papers about a specific topic (each paper at least five pages long, or have two shorter papers in place of one over 5 pages). You can get ideas about papers by looking into magazines like IEEE Software, IEEE Computer, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, JOOPS (Journal of Object-Oriented Programming), collections of papers like "Software Engineering" or "Software Engineering and Project Management", both by M. Dorfman and R. H. Thayer, or by looking at Gio's list of references (look for the ones marked with SW). The topic has to be closely related to CS446. It can but needs not to explore one of the lecture topics more in-depth, it can also address another topic about how to develop software. Examples of topics: "Modeling and determining the architecture of a system", "Problems in determining the requirements for a system", "Process models for software development", "Managing the risks of a software project", "Getting reuse going in an organization", "Issues in modeling real-time systems", "Design patterns: papers from conferences and design patterns and architecture patterns", ....

Project Description (Assignment 5): a short note (maximum half a page) describing which papers you have chosen, why you have chosen these papers, and what results you expect (what you expect to discover or learn or find out, what correlations you hope to make), week 3 to 7, has to be turned in Nov. 8, 3:15 pm
Project Results (Assignment 6): a two-page summary of the results (your findings, your conclusions) or a talk (will depend on class size), week 8 to 10, has to be turned in Nov. 29, 3:15 pm

Assignment 5 and 6 can be turned in by email, in case the email only contains plain text and no attachments. Otherwise turn in a printout.

Late policy

The due dates given are the latest possible date for turning in the assignments. The assignments are given well in advance, and I recommend you to start early and to hand them in the Friday before they are due. So you have three more days in case something does not work out as planned.