Calendar

Introduction

Mandatory reading: the Individual Project 0 Specification and the syllabus (No reading quiz today, but these are fair game for any subsequent reading quiz.)

Your Choice reading: Brooks’ No Silver Bullet

Code-level Design

Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s The Joel Test (note that this article is from 2000, so the examples are a little dated), Gransee’s Opinions on Opinionated Formatters, the Prettier team’s Option Philosophy, and Wikipedia’s Law of Triviality.

Your Choice reading: Ajami et al.’s Syntax, predicates, idioms — what really affects code complexity?

Reading Code

Mandatory reading: Atwood’s Learn to Read the Source, Luke, Coleman’s How to quickly and effectively read other people’s code, and the Individual Project 1 Specification

Your Choice reading: Endres et al.’s Relating Reading, Visualization, and Coding for New Programmers: A Neuroimaging Study

Testing (1)

Mandatory reading: Shore’s The Art of Agile Development: Test-Driven Development

Your Choice reading: Saff and Ernst’s An Experimental Evaluation of Continuous Testing During Development

Testing (2)

Mandatory reading: Petrovic’s Mutation Testing

Your Choice reading: Memon et al.’s Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing

Testing (3)

Mandatory reading: SQLite’s How SQLite is Tested and

Your Choice reading: Barr et al.’s The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A Survey

Requirements and Specifications (1)

Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s How to be a Program Manager, Ubl’s Design Docs at Google, and the Individual Project 2 Specification

Your Choice reading: Ernst et al.’s The Daikon system for dynamic detection of likely invariants

Requirements and Specifications (2)

Mandatory reading: Wayne’s Using Formal Methods at Work and the Group Project Specification

Your Choice reading: Lamport’s Introduction to TLA

Version Control

Mandatory reading: Ernst’s Version control concepts and best practices and Thompson’s My favourite Git commit

Your Choice reading: De Rosso et al.’s Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of git

Process

Mandatory reading: The Agile Manifesto and its Twelve Principles (this should be a quick read, but I suggest you think about what it is advocating for at least a few minutes before moving onto the next article) and Santo’s “Waterfall” doesn’t mean what you think it means

Your Choice reading: Anda et al.’s Variability and Reproducibility in Software Engineering: A Study of Four Companies that Developed the Same System

Working in Teams

Mandatory reading: Fowler’s Two Pizza Team and Jackson’s The Google Technical Interview

Your Choice reading: Behroozi et al.’s Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews?

Code Review

Mandatory reading: Google’s How to do a code review (read all six linked sub-pages in the bulleted list)

Your Choice reading: Bacchelli and Bird’s Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges Of Modern Code Review

Languages

Mandatory reading: Howarth’s Why Discord is Switching from Go to Rust

Your Choice reading: Hoare’s Hints on Programming Language Design (shorter than it looks!)

Build Systems

Mandatory reading: Atwood’s The F5 Key Is Not a Build Process

Your Choice reading: Mokhov et al.’s Build Systems à la Carte

Static Analysis

Mandatory reading: Ayewah et al.’s Experiences Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs and Schwartz-Narbonne’s How to integrate formal proofs into software development

Your Choice reading: Chapter 2 (“Abstract Interpretation”) of Ernst’s Notes on Program Analysis

Debugging (1)

Mandatory reading: Zeil’s Debugging – Using Hypotheses to Track Down the Culprit and Taylor’s Debugging

Your Choice reading: Ko and Myers’ Designing the WhyLine: A Debugging Interface for Asking Questions about Program Behavior

Project Deployment Demo due

Debugging (2)

Mandatory reading: Zeller’s Automated Debugging: Are We Close?

Your Choice reading: Cleve and Zeller’s Locating Causes of Program Failures

Mid-term Exam (in-class)

see the exams page for old and practice exams (with keys)

Software Architecture

Mandatory reading: Kästner’s Thinking Like a Software Architect and Ross’ How Architecture Diagrams Enable Better Conversations

Your Choice reading: Garlan’s Software Architecture

Design Patterns

Mandatory reading: Fowler’s Writing Software Patterns (read up to, but not including, “Common Pattern Forms”) and Lewis and Fowler’s Microservices

Your Choice reading: Kellogg et al.’s Verifying Object Construction

Project Wizard-of-Oz Demo due

Tech debt, refactoring, and maintenance (1)

Mandatory reading: Allman’s Managing Technical Debt

Your Choice reading: Kim et al.’s A Field Study of Refactoring Challenges and Benefits

Tech debt, refactoring, and maintenance (2)

Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s Things you should never do, part I and Majors’ Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies

Your Choice reading: Malkawi’s The art of software systems development: Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Performance (RAMP) (read up through the 4 “Cases” and then skip to and read the Discussion) or Scully et al.’s Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

DevOps (1)

Mandatory reading: Sloss’ “Introduction” and Baye’s “Emergency Response” from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering

Your Choice reading: Dean and Barroso’s “The Tail at Scale”

DevOps (2)

Mandatory reading: Lunney and Lueder’s “Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure” from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering and Luu’s “Postmortem Lessons”

Your Choice reading: Xu et al.’s “Do Not Blame Users for Misconfiguration”

Free and Open-source Software

Mandatory reading: Stallman’s Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software and Zaitsev’s The Future of Open Source is Polarized

Your Choice reading: Terrell et al.’s Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men

Software Engineer Panel

Mandatory reading: none, but you must submit a question by December 3 AoE

Your Choice reading: none

No class (Martin at NJPLS).

Totally Optional, For Fun Readings: Gross’ The Grug Brained Developer and Kingsbury’s Reversing the technical interview

What is Software Engineering?

Mandatory reading: Shaw’s “What makes good research in software engineering?”

Your Choice reading: read 10 abstracts in the latest ICSE proceedings and make a list of words you don’t know. Then, look up at least 5 of those words and write a brief definition. Send me the list of words, the 5 definitions, and the titles of the papers whose abstracts you read over email. (The reading quiz question for this reading will cover a topic that everyone who chooses this reading has read.)