ICS 413 and ICS 613

Fall, 2007  

Philip Johnson

johnson@hawaii.edu

956-3489

POST 307

Meeting Times:

• ICS 413: MW 10:30-11:45am, Kuy 210
• ICS 613: MW 1:30-2:45pm, POST 126

Office Hours: MW 3-4pm

The fundamental goal of ICS 413 and 613 is to take you to the next level with respect to your ability to design and implement high quality software systems.  This course takes a technological approach to the presentation of traditional software engineering concepts like specification, modeling, analysis, and design, such that by December you will have significantly new skill with useful tools including: the Java programming language, the Eclipse integrated development environment, the JUnit testing framework, the Subversion configuration management system, the Jupiter software review system, the JProfiler performance analysis tool, the Tomcat web application container, the Ant build system, the Checkstyle, PMD, and FindBugs automated quality assurance tools, Google Project Hosting, and the Hackystat software engineering measurement collection and analysis system.  Your skill with these tools and traditional software engineering concepts will be complemented by an understanding of agile software development methods, continuous integration and testing, process and product measurement and analysis, open source software development, and web application development. 

ICS 413 and ICS 613 will share the same basic syllabus and lecture sequence. The graduate version will include enhanced readings and additional project requirements.

While ICS 413 and ICS 613 require discipline and effort, the results appear to be worth the investment.  Here are some course evaluation comments from the last time I taught them:

• "This course is crucial for all ICS students. It was very valuable!"
• "Excellent course for ICS majors.  Should not miss it."
• "Highly recommend this class."
• "I really enjoyed this class and learned more than in my entire college career combined. It also made me discover my love for programming".
• "Excellent---teaching the real facts that we actually need to know."
• "I used to dread software engineering, now I love it."

In addition, the skills you acquire in ICS 413 and 613 provide professional advantages.  Aaron Kagawa, a software engineer and recruiter for Referentia Corporation, has this to say: It has been my experience that learning technologies like Ant, JUnit, Eclipse, and Subversion and practices like Code Reviews, Extreme Programming, and User Testing will separate you from the rest of crowd when applying for entry level Software Engineering positions. While recruiting and evaluating University of Hawaii ICS students one of the first questions I ask is "Did you take 413 Software Engineering?" Followed by, "Do you know what JUnit is?"