Course Material for 159-329/158-329 Software Engineering Project

Preliminary Outline: PDF.

Meet with lecturer/team mentor(s) in QA5 at 2pm every Monday during BOTH Semesters...

Monday 3-4 QA5, and Friday 12-2, AT6 are room-booked sessions available to you to discuss your projects amongst your groups.

There are many software engineering texts that might help you plan and execute your group projects. It is not obvious which of the many available you will have time to read. One classic that is definitely worthwhile reading is The Mythical Man Month by Frederick P. Brooks. The anniversary edition is dated 1995, ISBN 0-201-83595-9 is still an excellent read. Although the ideas are linked to experiences of the author that seem dated, the ideas about working in teams and how it relates to software are timeless and still very relevant.

You may find the chapter on the Surgical Team gives you some ideas for how you might organise your own project team. Other chapters on communications, scheduling, project management and progress, documentation, tools and methods are are also good reading.

A follow on book entitled "The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist," 2010, also by F.P. Brooks has some more up to date experiences and is also a good read on software engineering experiences.

Some useful resources and links:

• The Mythical Man Month - Wikipedia page - this gives you a hint on how widely respected this book still is.
  
  
• 005.1 is the Dewey Decimal code for Software Engineering - we have a good collection of Software Enbgineering Texts in Massey's Library. Ian Sommerville's book "Software Engineering" - 8th Edition is one of the more readable.
  
  
• Software Enginering radio Podcasts provides a good collection of podcast material on various software engineering ideas, methods, experiences. There are too many now to listen to all of them but pick and choose carefully and you can get some good insights into the pragmatics of modern software engineering.