CSE P503, Spring 2009: Principles of Software Engineering

UW CSE Professional Masters Program

• Lecture Th 6:30-9:30PM in EEB 031
• Instructor David Notkin (notkin@cs)
• Office hours: I will generally try to be available for the 30 minutes before class, try to stick around after for questions, to answer email, and to take calls about the course (x5-3798).
  
• TA Suporn Pongnumkul (suporn@...)
  
• Mailing list csep503a_sp09@u.washington.edu
• Membership will be automatically managed based on official class lists
• Postings from other than your .u email account may be delayed until approved for posting
• Class wiki You will need a CSENetID to access this wiki; PMP students should already have one and GNM students will be getting one by Friday April 3, 2009, via Dave Rispoli.  (If you are in the PMP and have forgotten yours, check with Dave about how to resurrect the information.)
  
• Readings  The readings for the course are listed below.
• Access to many of the readings is through DOI's (digital object identifiers), most commonly into the ACM and IEEE Digital Libraries, which usually will require you to be logged in from a UW IP address for licensing reasons.  (Also see http://lib.washington.edu/help/proxytools.html for a way -- so it says -- for accessing these resources from a non-UW IP address.) Some of the readings may be available elsewhere on the Internet. 
• There is no text book for the course.  Here are some books that have been recommended or required in software engineering courses elsewhere.
• Read prior to lecture on
  
• April 9, 2009 (specifications)
  
• T. Ball, B. Cook, V. Levin and S.K. Rajamani. SLAM and Static Driver Verifier: technology transfer of formal methods inside Microsoft.
  
• R.J. Anderson, P. Beame, S. Burns,  W. Chan, F. Modugno, D. Notkin. and J.D. Reese. Model checking large software specifications.
  
• A. Hall.  Seven myths of formal methods.
• April 16, 2009 (Alloy and bounded model checking)
• D. Jackson.  A direct path to dependable software (skim if you want)
• Alloy tutorial -- work through the first two chapters
• April 23, 2009 (design)
• D.L. Parnas.  On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. 
  
• D.L. Parnas. Designing software for ease of extension and contraction.
• G. Kiczales et al. Open implementation design guidelines. 

• Examinations By University rule, an instructor is allowed to dispense with a final examination at the scheduled time (6:30-8:20PM, Thursday June 11, 2009) with unanimous consent of the class.  If you prefer to have a final examination for the entire class, you must let me know by the 6:00PM before the second lecture (April 9, 2009).
• Lectures Notes will generally be linked to the date in the calendar below after the lecture.
• Week 1: introduction, perspectives and biases, etc.
• Week 2: model checking
• Week 3: bounded model checking (Alloy) and design
• Week 4: information hiding, layering, patterns, etc.
• Week 5: Aspect-oriented programming
• Week 6: introduction to testing and cooperative bug isolation and test prioritization
• Week 7: mutation testing, concolic testing, ...
• Week 8: Notkin gone
• Week 9: software summarization
  
• Assigned work  Barring the need for a final, there four major assignments in the course, each worth 25% of the total grade.  For projects done in groups, the very strong expectation is that a single grade will be shared equally among all participants in the group.
• Essay on software engineering.  Due 6:00PM on Thursday April 16, 2009.  You are to write a 5-10 page articulate, well-reasoned essay, with appropriate citations about one of the three topics listed below.  (I recommend that you skim the materials for each of the first and third topics, for your own interest as well as to help you pick a topic.)  You will submit the essay on the wiki, visible to all participants in the class; one-fifth of your grade for the essay will depend on comments you make (as of Wednesday April 22, 2009 at 6PM) via the wiki on essays written by your classmates.  The three topics are:
  
  1. Consider the 1968 and 1969 NATO Software Engineering Conferences.  (These 40 year-old documents are long but quite easy and fascinating to read.)  Characterize issues that (a) have been solved, (b) are no longer material, and (c) are still pertinent but remain unsolved.  Also identify current technologies, methodologies, etc. (if any) that are argued to address the pertinent-but-not-yet-solved issues.
  2. Consider three or four "software disasters" not discussed in class (some basic web searching will identify a number of these).  Describe each of them with some care and provide a thoughtful analysis of the core causes of each disaster.  Pick disasters for which there is a non-trivial analysis.  Conclude the essay with an assessment of the way these disasters are generally presented in comparison to your own analysis.
  3. Consider the SWEBOK Guide, Chapter 1, "Introduction to the Guide" (found in several formats at the site) and "An Assessment of Software Engineering Body of Knowledge Efforts", A Report to the ACM Council (May 2000, by Notkin, Gorlick and Shaw).  Thoughtfully argue that the SWE Body of Knowledge guide is or is not an appropriate basis for the licensing of software engineers: citations to supporting documents is essential.  (Note, too, that Notkin-Gorlick-Shaw report is nearly a decade old, which is a long, long time; in other words, don't just mimic that report.)
     
• Alloy assignment.  Due 6:00PM on Thursday April 30, 2009.  http://alloy.mit.edu/community/ for downloads, etc.  Can be done in groups. 
  
• State-of-the-research report.  Due 6:00PM on Thursday May 21, 2009. This is a secondary research report that requires the definition of a topic, and approval by me, identification of pertinent papers and materials (perhaps with help from me), perhaps some hands-on experience for some kinds of topics, and finally a scholarly report on the topic and your analysis of it, complete with citations, open questions, etc. The list of potential topics is enormous, but perhaps a few examples might help: state-of-the-research in ... symbolic execution, random testing, code searching, reliability models, software inspections, program slicing, automatic theorem proving, clone analysis, …..  On the whole, the following papers from an ICSE 2000 "future of software engineering" track are in roughly the style I'd like http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/conf/icse/future2000.html is the whole list (in the ACM Digital Library) Some are much better than others, and the part that looks to the future could/should be reduced with an added focus on current status.  But still, the feel is reasonable.   As for length, roughly the same as these (10 conference pages) is fine, but I'm flexible within reason.  Submitted through the wiki, and commenting is once again expected (but I won't grade for it directly).
  
• Assignment 4.  Due 6:00PM on Monday June 8, 2009.  A choice of 
• Proposed curriculum per last week’s email
• A shorter (5 page) additional research paper on a different topic (no approval is needed, but be reasonable)
• An Alloy model for something you work on and want to understand better (no need to break NDA)
• Academic misconduct is a very serious offense and will be dealt with through the departmental, college and university processes. Copying others' work, including from this or previous quarters or from publicly available sources without attribution, is considered cheating.  If in doubt about what might constitute cheating, send the instructor email describing the situation. For more details see the CSE Academic Misconduct web page.