ICS 413: Software Engineering I

Fall, 2008  

Philip Johnson

philipmjohnson@gmail.com

956-3489

Schedule

Meeting Times: MW 1:30pm - 2:45pm, HOLM 243

Office Hours: MW 3-4pm, POST 307

A primary goal of ICS 413 is to take you to the next level with respect to your ability to design and implement high quality software systems using open source software development principles.  This course takes a technological approach to the presentation of traditional software engineering concepts like specification, modeling, analysis, and design. By the end of the semester, you will acquire significant new skills 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 Wicket web application framework, 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 open source software development methods, continuous integration and testing, process and product measurement and analysis, agile software development, and web application development. 

A secondary goal of this class is to help you establish a "professional persona".  This includes: (a) a professional, permanent email address; (b) a professional portfolio; (c) a blog owned by you that focuses on professional issues; and (d) participation in professional networking sites such as LinkedIn and TechHui. 

While ICS 413 requires discipline and effort, the results appear to be worth the investment.  Here are some recent course evaluation comments:

• "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."

The skills you acquire in ICS 413 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?"