Calendar

Week 1

Sep 1

No Class (Labor Day): Totally Optional, For Fun Readings: Gross’ The Grug Brained Developer and Kingsbury’s Reversing the technical interview

Sep 3

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

Week 2

Sep 8

Individual Project 0 due

Sep 8

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?

Sep 10

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

Week 3

Sep 15

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

Sep 17

Testing (2): Mandatory reading: Petrovic’s Mutation Testing and the Individual Project Proposal specification
Your Choice reading: Memon et al.’s Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing

Week 4

Sep 22

Individual Project 1 due

Sep 22

Testing (3): Mandatory reading: SQLite’s How SQLite is Tested and the Group Project Specification.
Your Choice reading: Barr et al.’s The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A Survey

Sep 24

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

Week 5

Sep 29

Individual Project Proposal due

Sep 29

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

Oct 1

Working in Teams: Mandatory reading: Fowler’s Two Pizza Team and Arguelles’ My favorite coding question to give candidates (and why)
Your Choice reading: Behroozi et al.’s Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews?

Oct 3

Team Assignments published no later than this date.

Week 6

Oct 6

Requirements and Specifications (1): Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s How to be a Program Manager and Ubl’s Design Docs at Google.
Your Choice reading: Ernst et al.’s The Daikon system for dynamic detection of likely invariants

Oct 8

Requirements and Specifications (2): Mandatory reading: Wayne’s Using Formal Methods at Work.
Your Choice reading: Lamport’s Introduction to TLA

Week 7

Oct 13

Project Plan due

Oct 13

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

Oct 15

Languages: Mandatory reading: Howarth’s Why Discord is Switching from Go to Rust and Schwab’s Safety through Incompatibility
Your Choice reading: Hoare’s Hints on Programming Language Design (shorter than it looks!)

Week 8

Oct 20

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

Oct 22

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

Week 9

Oct 27

Revised Project Plan due

Oct 27

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

Oct 29

Debugging (2): Mandatory reading: Zeller’s Automated Debugging: Are We Close? and Alpert’s TODOs aren’t for doing
Your Choice reading: Cleve and Zeller’s Locating Causes of Program Failures

Oct 31

Project Deployment Demo due

Week 10

Nov 3

Mid-term Exam (in-class): see the exams page for old and practice exams (with keys)

Nov 5

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

Nov 7

First Project Team Survey due

Nov 7

Project Wizard-of-Oz Demo due

Week 11

Nov 10

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

Nov 12

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

Week 12

Nov 17

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: Scully et al.’s Machine Learning: The High-Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt

Nov 19

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”

Nov 21

Project Preliminary Demo due

Week 13

Nov 24

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”

Nov 26

No class (Friday classes meet for Thanksgiving holiday)

Nov 26

Second Project Team Survey due

Week 14

Dec 1

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

Dec 3

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.)

Week 15

Dec 8

Software Engineer Panel: Mandatory reading: none, but you must submit a question by December 7 AoE
Your Choice reading: none

Dec 10

All group project final deliverables due

Dec 10

Optional Oral Exam that replaces IP1 score. Submit this form if you want to take the exam by Monday 12/8 AoE. Exam takes place in GITC 4402.

Dec 12

Group project demos for the instructor must be done by this date AoE. Attendence (in-person) is required. At least one group member must bring a laptop with a working demo of your group project (running in a publicly-accessible, deployed covey.town instance). Your team can sign up for a timeslot here.

Dec 13

Third Project Team Survey due

Dec 13

Individual Reflection due

Week 16

Dec 15: Final exam at 8:30-11:00am in CULMT LEC 2
Dec 18: All group project final deliverables (re-submission) due