COMP 2007

R J Walters

COMP 2007 - 1

Introduction

Try to place this course in context A bit of history “Engineering”?

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Software Engineering:Who cares?

I do Its what this course is about I don’t really trust the way we make

software these days It should lead to better software (I’m being paid to)

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Who cares?

You do You need it to pass this course You need it for the group project, and

your own project next year It’s what real developers get paid to do It might help you get a job I’ll be marking some of this course and

COMP 2012

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What Am I talking about?

Compare Software with Hardware

Characteristics of the activity of building Software It is new It isn’t constrained by the “real world” It can be very big (complex)

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Where are we now?

Clever systems are everywhere Many of them are a bit suspect Describing the way we build

software as Engineering is still stretching things a bit

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How did we get into this mess?

Initial concentration on hardware Complacency Tolerance

Crisis? What crisis?

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Where have we been? Rats nest

Machine language and assembler The flow-chart and the goto

Structured programming Modules, dataflow, SSADM, Jackson

(JSD) and all the rest Objects

Java, UML

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A few asides

“Proprietary” methods Formal methods Extreme programming Prototyping

Component based systems

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Where will it end?

OO might be it Or it might not

Engineering software is what we ought to be doing

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Engineering? Build things in such a way that we know:

It will do the job and how reliable it will be

How much it will cost and how long it will take to make

What we did and how to make another (better) one

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Engineering? There is more to Software Engineering

than the programming paradigm Requirements and Specification Design Testing Maintenance Documentation Process Standards?

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To sum up

Software Engineering is something we have to worry about

It is more than the programming language we use

It is what enables teams to build big systems

We don’t have all the answers

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Questions?

Suggested reading Your UML reference Software Engineering, 7th Edition,

Ian Sommerville Software Engineering: A Practitioner's

Approach, Roger Pressman

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