Introduction to Software Systems COMP6710

Course overview

Assumed knowledge & required skills

The equivalent in programming background to the undergraduate courses COMP1100 or COMP1730

Course description

This course introduces students to the tools and techniques for developing software systems of a size and quality of an industrially relevant nature. The course teaches the fundamental strategies of abstraction, decomposition and reuse as methods for constructing such systems. Verification and validation techniques, with an emphasis on testing, are taught as a means to ensure that students are able to deliver software products of the quality required.

In particular, the course will cover: recursive data structures and algorithms; structured data types, abstract data types and their applications; object-oriented programming; and software life-cycle. The course will also introduce some of the theoretical fundamentals that underpins software engineering, including: reasoning about software and its application to specifications, and verification and validation

Textbooks

Cay Horstmann,, Big Java, Wiley, 4th Edition, 2010

Workload

Thirty one-hour lectures and nine two-hour tutorial/laboratory sessions.