CS 480 Design -- Individual Project
Fall 2004
Last
updated: September
20, 2004
General Course Information:
Class Meetings: Monday - Wednesday,
2:30 - 4:00 PM, JEB 328
Lecture Topics and Assignments
Documentation Guidelines
Status Report & Class Effort Data
Product Documentation
Greetings from you instructors:
CS 480 has changed!
If you've been in our program for a few semesters you've probably
heard stories about the course, the amount of work involved, the large
percentage of time spent on document preparation, and the relatively small
amount of time spent on coding and testing as you define and develop a unique
product for your customer. Let me assure you that there will still be a lot of
work, there will still be documents to produce, and you get plenty of
opportunity to do coding and testing. What is different is that
we are no longer having you do an individual
project for an outside customer. Instead we have you working in a more
controlled environment and will make all of the work clearly relevant to a solid
engineering approach to software product development. We are also going to focus
on the application of sound software engineering principles as you move through
the various activities it takes to build a reliable product. You will still be
doing individual work, but you may be doing the same work as other students and
there will be a lot more interaction with other students in the
class.
We will jointly select the the semester-long
project. Most software development that occurs today leverages an existing set
of code so it's important to be able to dig into a system written by someone
else and be able to understand it. The project we select may be based on a
project from an earlier semester or from another course. During the early
part of the semester we will be concentrating on understanding and documenting
the operational characteristics of the application we will develop, then the
creating and documenting the functional characteristics (design), and then doing
the implementation. Implementation will be followed by thorough testing.
When applicable we will study existing documentation and code then reverse
engineering the product if need be to produce a complete and accurate set of
specifications. The
specifications you develop will be used during the latter part of the semester
as the base from which you will define, design, implement, and test changes to
provide enhanced capabilities to the product.
In making this fairly significant change to CS
480, I don't want you to think that I have all the answers about what's going to
happen during the semester. In fact I am looking forward to a modest degree of
experimentation and the uncertainty that it brings. Some of what I try may work
fine, some may not. When it doesn't I'll make adaptations and try again. Anyway
that's pretty much how real world project proceed.
Instructor Contact Information
| Bill
Junk |
Computer Science Dept.,
University of Idaho, Janssen Engr Bldg 324, PO Box 441010, Moscow, ID
83844-1010 |
|
Telephone: 208-885-7530
|
|
Fax:
208-885-9052 |
|
E- Mail:
billjunk@cs.uidaho.edu |