Software Engineering

I co-taught this course several times. It covers the principles and practices of Software Engineering. The following are some of the primary topics that we covered:

• Values, principles, and practices of the Agile design process

• Paired Programming

• Test-Driven Development (TDD)

• Identify "rot" in code, and know how to refactor to improve

• Programming skills in JAVA

• Event-driven programming in Java

• Design principles and patterns

We used these tools:

• Version control (Git) for support team programming projects

• UML (uniform modeling language) to explore and communicate design decisions

The course was in a “flipped” format, meaning that the students had to watch lecture videos and do other preparatory work prior to class. During class, the students worked on coding assignments in pairs. There were some short design and implementation assignments, and one large assignment. The large assignment was to develop and code the board game “Clue”, where a human player could play against a set of computer players. This project also introduced the concepts of event driven programming, using the Java’s Swing library for graphical user interface elements.