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COMP2100/2500
COMP2500: Software Construction for Software Engineers

Introduction

COMP2500 Software Construction for Software Engineers is new in 2005. Along with COMP1510 and COMP2510, it was introduced to fill the gap created by abolishing the zero-point 800 series courses COMP1800, COMP2800, COMP3800. COMP2500 is only for students enrolled in the Bachelor of Software Engineering. If you are in any other degree, you don't need to read this. If you are in the Bachelor of Software Engineering, you must do COMP2500, not COMP2100.

For the most part, COMP2500 students will do exactly the same things as COMP2100 students. The differences between the two units are:

1. You must attend five special Software Engineering Seminars on Thursday afternoons from 3pm to 5pm in the Engineering Lecture Theatre. These will take place in weeks 1, 3, 5, 9 and 13 (the non-lab weeks when there is no assignment due).

2. You must complete an additional assessment item, a short oral presentation to the class, with a follow-up written report.

3. Your 30% for continuous assessment will be made up of 10% for each programming assignment, plus 5% for the oral presentation and 5% for the written report. (For COMP2100 students it is just 15% for each programming assignment. In other words, the programming assignments are worth fewer marks to software engineers.)

4. There may be differences in the final examination for COMP2500 students. We haven't decided this yet.

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Software Engineering Seminars

There will be five seminars, all held in the Engineering Lecture Theatre on odd-numbered Thursday afternoons when there is no programming assignment due. The room is booked from 3pm to 5pm. In the first hour of each session we will have a seminar from an outside speaker (or speakers) on a topic relevant to software engineering. In the second hour, starting in Week 3, we will have oral presentations as described below.

Here are some details of the seminars:

Week	Date	Speaker	Topic
1	Thursday 24th February	Paul Preston (Academic Skills and Learning Centre)	Giving oral presentations
3	Thursday 10th March	Paul Preston (Academic Skills and Learning Centre)	Report writing/plain English
5	Thursday 24th March	Ian Barnes (Department of Computer Science)	Personality type and software development
9	Thursday 5th May	Panel of former students: Andrew Fletcher, Simon Gemmell, Dave Price, Brad Hoff & Terence Tan	Work, life after study, reflections on the BSEng degree
13	Thursday 2nd June	Avigail Abarbanel (counsellor/psychotherapist)	Communication skills

One of the last three seminars will be presented by a panel of former software engineering students, probably from the class who finished in 2002. These students have been in the workplace for two years now and will discuss their experiences as well as reflecting on their studies in the light of those experiences. This should be very interesting.

Attendance at seminars is compulsory. The roll will be marked. You will be allowed to miss one session without penalty. After that, the penalty will be failure with a grade of NCN (incomplete). Absences will only be excused with a letter from a doctor or other health-care professional. The standard of proof is the same as that required for an extension on an assignment.

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Oral presentation

You must make a short oral presentation to the COMP2500 class in one of the Thursday afternoon sessions. You will do this in pairs. You may choose your own partner. (But choose wisely. Friendships have ended over pair and team work.)

Topic. Your presentation and the follow-up report must be on a topic related to software engineering and software development.You may choose your own topic, but it must be approved by me. Send me email telling me who will be working together and what the topic is. I will reply, either saying “Yes, go ahead”, “No, think again” or asking you to come and see me to discuss it.

Timing. There is only an hour for presentations in each of the four sessions, so you can't all do it in Week 13. Time slots will be filled on a first-in first-served basis, so don't leave it too late or you could miss out entirely! (If Week 3 has come and gone and all the later slots are taken... It could happen.) My strong recommendation is to get this over with as early in the semester as possible, before the pressure from other work becomes too great. If you start early and work well, these should be easy marks.

Length of presentations. Presentations must be between 8 and 10 minutes in length.

Assessment criteria for oral presentations. Your oral presentation will be marked out of 10, with 3 marks for content and 7 marks for the presentation itself. The criteria are:

1. Ready to start on time.

2. Keep to time, between 8 and 10 minutes in length.

3. Speaking in a clear voice (not too quiet or too loud, easy to understand), good pace (not too fast or too slow).

4. Rapport with audience (frequent eye contact, no distracting mannerisms or fidgetting...).

5. No waffling, maintained interest.

6. Clear and effective visual aids (any text is legible, any graphics are relevant, no silly sound effects or animated transitions without a very good reason).

7. Clear structure (clear beginning, middle and end, satisfying conclusion, signposts letting audience know where you're up to), effective and logical division between partners with flow maintained across the transitions.

8. Suitable amount of content (2-4 points made clearly).

9. Suitable standard and depth of content.

10. Jargon terms defined, sources referenced.

Timetable for oral presentations

Note that this is a working draft. There are still a couple of students missing from this, so we may have to have a fourth talk one week. I will fill in the topics as I approve them.

Week	Date	Speakers	Topic
Week 3	Thursday 10th March	James Barker Frank Hmeidan	Code Security: Obfuscation and Watermarking
		Emily Wong Luke Nguyen-Hoan	Games development and how it differs from normal software development
		Rebecca Marshall Alastair Parker	Outsourcing
Week 5	Thursday 24th March	Ronald Waldon Jeffrey Thompson	Reverse debugging
		Shane Donohoe Carrie Campbell	Worse is better
		Matthew Grieve Pillip McCorkindale	Open source
Week 9	Thursday 5th May	Ramakrishnan Rajan Simon Bragg	Agile vs. Traditional Software Development
		Jan Vaughan Torben Schou	GUI consistency
		Jack Kelly Luke Worth	Profitable open source
		Mark Garside Michael McGee	The digital divide
Week 13	Thursday 2nd June	Rohan Mitchell David Schoen	Peer-to-peer file sharing
		Jesse Leeder David Sullivan	Mac vs Windows
		Xuan Zhao Tim O'Keefe	The development and direction of the CMM

Suggested topics

Here are a few ideas to help get you started.

• Traditional vs. agile methods in software engineering

• Eiffel vs. Java

• Other language comparisons

• Too much quality?

• Military standards

• More on the CMM

• Open source... (vs. “professional” software development, pros & cons, Is Bill Gates right when he says that open source and free software stifle creativity?...)

• Ethical questions in software development and software engineering

• Games development — what's it like and how does it differ from “normal” software development?

That's all I can think of right now, but I'll add some more as I think of them.

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Written reports

Your report is due on the Friday of the week after you give your talk. Bring it to me in my office, or if I'm not in, take it to Sam in the DCS front office and ask her (nicely) to put a date stamp on it and stick it in my mailbox. You may also email it to me. (But don't get any ideas: programming assignments must be submitted as described in the assignment specifications. I will not accept them by email.)

If you email me your report, please send it either in PDF (with page size A4), or in OpenOffice.org .sxw format. I can open and read MSWord .doc format documents, but the formatting often gets messed up. Fixing that is your job, not mine.

Your report must between one and two A4 pages in length, when printed on A4 paper with reasonable margins and a clear, readable font no smaller than 10pt and no larger than 12pt. Poor formatting will be penalised, so keep it clear and simple. Your report must be written in clear, plain language. No jargon, no garbled syntax, not too many fancy words.

Assessment criteria for written reports were discussed in Paul Preston's talk. I'll post them again here soon.

[ANU] [DCS] [COMP2100/2500] [Description] [Schedule] [Lectures] [Labs] [Homework] [Assignments] [COMP2500] [Assessment] [PSP] [Java] [Reading] [Help]