Software Analysis and Design COMP2130

Course overview

Course description

This course builds upon COMP2100 /COMP2500 by addressing the requirements, architecture and design phases of the software development life-cycle. It has a primary focus on modeling and its central role in eliciting, understanding, analysing and communicating software requirements, architecture and design. Students will learn to use several different modeling approaches to describe complex subject matters typically involved in developing, analysing and specifying requirements, architecture and design. While most of the approaches will seem straight forward and even conceptually simple, students will discover that a good deal of effort and diligence is required to produce useful, accurate, meaningful, understandable and easily maintainable models. Through a series of practical workshops, students will develop an appreciation for the characteristics and capabilities of each approach, and will learn to make decisions as to the best approach to use for a given purpose. Students will then learn how to integrate several modeling approaches to form software requirements, architecture and design specifications that are unambiguous, consistent and understandable. At the end of the course, students will be introduced to various approaches for automating the translation of specifications (models) into operational software systems. This will include topics such as model translation, code generation and an overview of active research in the area of model-driven engineering.

Textbooks

There are no prescribed textbooks for this course, but the following book covers many of the concepts addressed in the course.

Mellor, Stephen J. & Balcer, Marc J. Executable UML - A foundation for Model-Driven Architecture, (2002). Additional references will posted as appropriate on the course web page.

Workload

Thirteen two-hour lectures and seven two-hour workshop sessions.