Course Information

Syllabus

Monday and Wednesday deliverables are due before midnight. Tuesday and Thrusday deliverables are due in lecture. All deliverables (other than the individual postmortem report) are to be handed in using CVS in your project workspace, including all presentation materials. The individual postmortem report will be handed in by email.

Goals for the Course

• Practice teamwork on a realistic project
• Realistic stakeholder involvement
• Realistic project scope and goals
• Realistic process and tools
• Put together many of the things you have learned in previous course
• Substantial requirement specifications
• Substantial design work
• Substantial implementation
• Substantial quality assurance
• Substantial documentation
• Achieve a result that you are proud of, and that you can discuss with potential employers

Expectations for the course

• You will give me a list of other students that you would like to work with
• I will assign students onto teams
• Teams will consist of about 4 students each
• Please do not add or drop this course after first week
• You will rank three projects that your team would like to work on
• I will assign each team to actually work on one of the given projects
• You will meet with the customer about 2 times, and keep in touch via email
• You will build an HTML mockup of the system
• Your implementation language will be Java (unless otherwise required)
• You will follow the Java coding standards, including Javadoc comments
• You will keep all project documents and source code under CVS
• You will track defects, enhancements, and tasks using bugzilla
• You will maintain a project website on projects.ics.uci.edu
• You will maintain project documents in the format provided
• You will use Ant to compile code, build Javadocs, and run automated tests
• Your QA plan will include a formal review meeting
• Your QA plan will include automated unit testing using JUnit
• Your QA plan will include systematic manual system testing
• You will provide weekly written status reports, and some will be presented in lecture
• You will make two contributions to the course knowledge-base (see below)
• We will use only a few of the TA sessions (MWF 9-9:50) for tool demonstrations or exercises. We will also use it if student presentations run over the scheduled lecture meetings.
• The final will consist of questions drawn from the lectures, class knowledge-base, project document templates, manditory readings, and your own experiences in the project.
• You are free to reuse code or information that you find relevant to your project, so long as you give credit and your project plan and status reports honestly represente the work done by your team.
• You must always follow UCI's rules of academic conduct

Projects Offered

Here is the list of available projects.

Deliverables and Grading

Normally, all team members will get the same grade on their project work. Individual grades can vary based on final exam scores and my judgement of how much work each team member did. I will base that judgement on the individual postmortem reports and metrics such as the number of closed issues, the number and type of source code changes made, and participation on team mailing lists and in lecture.

Textbooks and Reading

• Optional: Software Release Methodology, by Micheal E Bays
• Optional: Code Complete, by Steve McConnell
• Handout: Thirteen steps to a successful system demo
• CVS book on-line
• JUnit docs on-line
• Ant docs on-line

Class Knowledge-base

Throughout this course we will work together to build a knowledge-base of relevant information. I will start off by providing an outline and initial content. Information in the knowledge-base will expand on ideas presented in lecture by adding your own thoughts and experience.

Each student is required to contribute at least two pieces of information to the knowledge-base. Each item must not already be in the KB. If two students propose the same item at the same time, the one who expresses it best will get credit and the other will have to contribute a different item. You make your contribution by emailing it to the knowledge-base mailing list. Note that everyone else in the class will see your item when you send it. I may ask you questions, and you must respond.

The instructor and TA will review items posted to the mailing list and add them to the knowledge-base. I will maintain the organization of the knowledge-base, but suggestions for new sections are certainly welcome.

The contents of the class knowledge-base may be covered on the final exam.

The purpose of this exercise is to convey more information than can be covered in lecture, and to allow students to practice effective participation in professional mailing lists.

Development Document Templates

Software engineering requires careful thought and planning. This is done by writing documents for the project proposal, overview, plan, requirements, specification, design, release notes, demos, etc. This is usually a significant fraction of the overall effort put into software development.

For this course, you will use a set of project document templates. You will fill in the content to describe your particular project. This will allow the course to go into greater depth and breadth with less effort spent on mechanics. The templates themselves contain a good amount of useful information to get you started and make you think.

Catalog description

125 Project in System Design (4). Specification, design, construction, testing, and documentation of a complete software system using concepts learned in ICS 52, 121, and 141. Special emphasis on the need for and use of teamwork, careful planning, and other techniques for working with large systems. Prerequisites: ICS 51 with a grade of C or better; ICS 121 and 141; Mathematics 2A-B-C.

Notes