Computer Science 507

Computer Science 507
Software Engineering

Spring 2015, The College of Saint Rose

Instructor and Course Information

Instructor:	Dr. James D. Teresco, Albertus Hall 400-6, (518) 485-3755
Electronic mail:	terescoj AT strose.edu (best contact method)
Twitter:	`@JTeresco_StR_CS`
Class URL:	[Link]
Class hour:	Monday 6:00-8:40, Albertus 205
Office hours:	Monday 1:30-2:30, Tuesday 2:00-3:30, Wednesday 1:30-2:30, immediately after class, and by appointment

Texts

The required text for the course is Software Engineering, Ninth Edition (Addison-Wesley, 2010, ISBN 0137035152) by Ian Sommerville. This is available from the Saint Rose Bookstore (and elsewhere). If you buy elsewhere, be sure to get the correct edition.

Course News

Thank you for a successful and enjoyable course.

Submission Guidelines

Your submissions for lab assignments will include several types of items. Different requirements apply to each, as described below. It is important that you adhere to file format and naming requirements to facilitate grading. Submissions that do not meet these requirements will not be accepted.

Speaker Reactions

Everyone will be required to participate in a discussion about each of our guest speakers on a blogging site.

Practice Questions

These will usually be designed to focus your attention on some aspects of the assigned readings. These are graded on completeness rather than correctness, and will generally be discussed in class on the due date. No late submissions of these can be accepted.

Lab Questions

These are graded for both correctness and completeness, and are subject to normal late penalty rules.

The answers to all "practice questions" and "lab questions" for a particular lab should be included within a single plain-text or PDF file named labn.txt or labn.pdf, as appropriate, where n is the lab number. The file should start with your name and the lab number. If you use plain text, your file should be appropriately line-wrapped for easy reading in a window or on a printed page with a width of 80 characters.

Note: for questions that ask you to draw a diagram, you have a few options. You may attempt to represent the memory with plain text, but that is difficult to construct and read. Ideally, you would use a drawing program and submit in your PDF file, but you are also permitted to draw the diagram on paper and submit a scan or photograph, as long as the diagram is legible in that form.

Output Captures

You will sometimes be asked to capture the output of an existing Unix command or one of your programs in a file for submission. The file name to use for each such task will be specified in the question.

Practice Programs

Your submissions for practice programs are graded primarily on correctness, but you will be required to include your name at the top of the program, and you must use the file name specified.

You are of course encouraged to practice good documentation, formatting, and style for these programs, but the grade will depend only on correctness (and having your name in a properly-named file).

Programming Assignments

These are the most formal submissions and will be graded on design, documentation, style, correctness, and efficiency (where appropriate). A good design will use an appropriate algorithm, data structures, and language constructs to solve the problem. A well-documented program will include a comment at the top of each file that includes your name, the assignment, and a description of the contents of the file. There should also be comments for each structure or class definition, each function or method definition (including a brief description of the function/method's purpose, its parameters, and return value), each variable or group of related variables, and any section of code whose purpose and/or behavior is not obvious from context or the code itself. Style requirements include appropriate formatting (sufficient and consistent indentation, spacing, and punctuation, wrapping long lines of code), good use of constants, and meaningful and appropriate names for variables, functions, constants, and parameters. Correctness, of course, requires the expected output be produced for a set of test inputs (which will normally not be provided in advance). Efficiency will be more important in some assignments than others, and requires that the program does not do any unnecessary computation or use any more memory than needed. This includes returning memory to the system when using dynamic memory management. And, of course, you must use the file name specified.