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COMP2100/2500
COMP2500: Software Construction for Software Engineers

Introduction

COMP2500 Software Construction for Software Engineers was introduced in 2005. Along with COMP1510 and COMP2510, it was designed 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 courses are:

1. You must attend four special Software Engineering Seminars on Fridays from 12 noon to 2pm in Manning Clarke Lecture Theatre 5. These will take place in weeks 3, 5, 9 and 13 (the non-lab weeks when there is no assignment due).

2. You must complete two additional assessment items:

   1. a short oral presentation to the class, done in groups, and worth 5%, and

   2. a one-page written report on one of the other groups' presentations, done individually, and worth 5% also.

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 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 Fridays when there is no programming assignment due. The room is booked from 12pm to 2pm. In the first hour of each session we will have a talk from an outside speaker (or speakers) on a topic relevant to software engineering. In the second hour, starting in Week 5, we will have oral presentations as described below.

(Note that in the official timetable site these seminars are referred to as “extra lectures”. Don't panic. They're the same thing.)

Here are some details of the seminars:

Week	Date	Speaker	Topic
3	Friday 10th March	Ian Barnes	Introduction to COMP2500
5	Friday 24th March	Mark Grundy (Consolve Pty. Ltd.)	TBA
9	Friday 5th May	Janelle Ireland (ANU Careers Centre)	Something about work experience and careers...
13	Friday 2nd June	TBA	TBA

I hope that one of the 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 three 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.

I hope that one of the other seminars will be presented by Dr Mark Grundy. Mark is former member of the department who now runs his own software engineering consultancy firm. He also acts as a mentor to all the fourth year software engineers as they do the team software engineering project.

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 Friday afternoon sessions. You will do this in groups of five or six (depending on numbers). I will choose the groups.

Here's the scenario: You are a new recruit working for a software consulting firm. This company aspires to be at CMM Level 5 (although they're not quite there yet). So, as well as being given some software development tasks (programming assignments), you are also required to take part in the company's innovation program. In your groups you will spend some time investigating promising new technologies relevant to the company's core business, which is open-source document management, internet and e-commerce development. At the moment the company is a Java shop, using fairly simple Unix development tools. They have recently upgraded their standard development process by mandating version control with Subversion and unit testing with JUnit, but they don't want to stop there. They want to be well informed about alternative developer tools and also languages, frameworks and so on, so that they can jump onto the right horse before it bolts.

Once you have completed your investigation, you will report back to the company on what you have found. This report will take the form of a 15-20 minute presentation by the entire group. (Leaving 5-10 minutes for questions, your absolute total time will be 25 minutes. This way we will be able to fit two presentations in the second hour in each of Weeks 5, 9 & 13. That's 6 groups. As we have 32 students, that means 4 of the groups will have 5 students in them and 2 will have 6.)

Topic. Your presentation should be on one of the following topics:

• Eclipse

• Ruby/Rails

• Python

• Zope/Plone

• Cocoon

• Reverse debugging

• Extreme programming

I may add more topics to this list. If there's a topic you think belongs here and that you'd like to do, contact me by email and we'll see.

Length of presentations. Presentations must be between 15 and 20 minutes in length.

Timetable for oral presentations

Week	Date	Group	Members	Topic
Week 5	Friday 24th March	Group D	Mischa Andrews Nicholas Bourke Stephen Cassel Timothy Prothero Greg Sollis	Python
		Group E	Rod Barker Mohammad Bezyan Stephen Doherty Christopher Lesbirel Matthew Shiers Evan Van Der Ploeg	Zope (& Plone?)
Week 9	Friday 5th May	Group A	Ewen Cameron Jonathon Hunklinger Christopher Maish Samuel Power James O'Brien	Reverse debugging
		Group B	Kerryn Boorman Jo Fegan Yue Huang Zhuo Yan Lee Yat Fung Yiu Ben Sadler	Eclipse
Week 13	Friday 2nd June	Group C	Sally Bayley Benjamin Coughlan Daniel Kulski Nathan Petchell Vikas Sharma Li Zhu	Extreme programming
		Group F	John Haynes Zhe Feng Lu Ke Qiao Adrian Sanguineti Huy Tran Danny Wang	Web 2.0

Assessment criteria for presentations. Your presentation will be marked out of 10, with 4 marks for content and 6 marks for the presentation itself. The criteria are:

1. Ready to start on time & keep to time, between 15 and 20 minutes in length.

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

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

4. No waffling, maintain interest.

5. 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).

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

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

8. Suitable standard and depth of content.

9. Stick to topic, relevance, usefulness of information.

10. Clear conclusion and summary. Yes or No?

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Written reports

As well as giving a presentation in your group, you are also required to prepare a one-page written report on one of the other group presentations.

Here's the scenario: Still in your role as a new member of our consulting firm, you attend an industry conference. You have to share the knowledge you have gained by reporting back to the company on what you have seen and heard.

Requirements for your report

1. Since your report will land on the desks of busy senior executive, it must fit entirely on one side of one sheet of paper.

2. It must have margins of at least 2.5cm all round and be in an 11pt or 12pt font.

3. It must be an executive summary, which means it must be very easy to read for a busy executive with lots of other stuff to think about. These people will not read long blocks of text. They are much happpier with bullet points they can skim. They don't want to have to think.

Function of your report

Your report must do two things:

1. It must summarise the content of the presentation you saw.

2. It must present your own critical evaluation of the technology presented. (Note: This is not your evaluation of the presentation, but of the technology it presents. Would you recommend that your company go deeper into this? Should they adopt it? Should they reject it? Why? Give simple concise reasons backed up by facts, but don't be afraid to give your opinion. Just make it clear what is fact and what is the presenters' opinion and what is yours. If you don't feel confident about the presentation you saw, you may want to do a bit of your own research to help you form a clearer opinion.)

Submitting your report. Email your report to <Ian dot Barnes at anu dot edu dot au>. (Obviously you'll have to reconstruct that address by putting a dot where it says “dot” and an “@” where it says “at”. I wrote it like that to foil dirty spammers who scrape email addresses from our web pages and then send me lots of stupid email advertisements.)

(By the way, just because I'm letting you email me your reports, don't get any ideas about emailing programming assignments. They must be submitted through the version control system as described in the assignment specifications. We will not accept programming assignments by email under any circumstances. If you can access email, then you can access the Subversion server.)

When you email me your report, please send it as an attachment in PDF format (with page size A4). This PDF file must print on any system I use in my daily work. (At the moment that includes Windows XP, Mac OS 10.4, Linux Fedora Core 4 and whatever Linux they have on the staff machines in the department... I think it's Ubuntu.) What this means is that you must make sure that whatever application you use to create PDF must embed all fonts in the document. You cannot rely on me having Adobe Garamond available and accessible on my machine.

Your report must be one A4 page in length, when printed on A4 paper with margins at least 2.5cm and a clear, readable font no smaller than 11pt 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. You must use grammatically correct complete English sentences. Avoid jargon, garbled syntax and fancy words.

Deadline for reports. Your report is due one week after the presentation you report on. More precisely, if you write about a talk from Week 5, your report is due by 5pm on Friday 31st March (the Friday of Week 6); if you write about a talk from Week 9, your report is due by 5pm on Friday 12th May (the Friday of Week 10); and if you write about a talk from Week 13 (not recommended), your report is due by 5pm on Friday 9th June (the Friday of the first week of exams).

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