CSE 331 Software Design & Implementation - Course Information and Syllabus - Winter 2012

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Logistics and Contact Information: Instructor: Hal Perkins, CSE 548, perkins(at)cs.
Teaching Assistants: Krysta Yousoufian, Jackson Roberts, Zachary Stein, and Laure Thompson.
See www.cs.washington.edu/331/ for information about the course, including office hours, etc.

Communications: A discussion list is linked to the course home page so we can keep in touch outside of class meetings. Please participate. You will also automatically be subscribed to a class mailing list at your uwnetid address. This will primarily be used for announcements, clarifications, hints, and other notices from the course staff, and you are responsible for everything that is mailed there.

Goals: There is a level of programming maturity beyond introductory programming that comes from building larger systems and understanding how to specify them precisely, manage their complexity, and verify that they work as expected. After completing this course successfully students should be able to:

• Successfully build medium-scale software projects in principled ways
• Understand the role of specifications and abstractions and how to verify that an implementation is correct, including effective testing and verification strategies and use of formal reasoning
• Analyze a software development problem and be able to design effective program structures to solve it, including appropriate modularity, separation of abstraction and implementation concerns, use of standard design patterns to solve recurring design problems, and use of standard libraries
• Use modern programming languages effectively, including understanding type systems, objects and classes, modularity, notions of identity and equality, and proper use of exceptions and assertions
• Gain experience with contemporary software tools, including integrated development environments, test frameworks, debuggers, version control, and documentation processing tools

To gain experience we will use Java and associated tools like Eclipse, JUnit, JavaDoc, and Subversion, but the goal is to understand the underlying ideas and concepts that are widely applicable to software construction.

Prerequisite: CSE 143 (i.e., intermediate programming in Java, including basic data structures like lists, queues, and binary search trees)

Grading and Exams:

• 55% - Homework assignments, approximately weekly
• 15% - Midterm exam, in class, date tbd
• 25% - Final exam, Monday, March 12, 8:30-10:20
• 5% - Quizzes, class participation, citizenship, and other

These numbers are tentative and will be adjusted as the quarter progresses to reflect the relative difficulty of the assignments.

Late Policy: Deadlines will be given with each assignment. These deadlines are strict. It is exceedingly unlikely that skipping class or being late to class because of homework is in your interest. For the entire quarter, you may have four "late days". You are strongly advised to save them for emergencies. You may not use more than two for the same assignment. On group projects you may only use late days if all members of the group have them available, and all members of the group will be charged for each late day used. They must be used in 24-hour (integer) chunks. This policy may not be the same as in your other classes. You are responsible for understanding it if you choose to submit late work.

Academic Integrity: Any attempt to misrepresent the work you submit will be dealt with via the appropriate University mechanisms, and your instructor will make every attempt to ensure the harshest allowable penalty. The guidelines for this course and more information about academic integrity are in a separate document. You are responsible for knowing the information in that document.

Texts: There are two required books for the course:

• The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, Addison-Wesley, 2000.
• Effective Java by Joshua Bloch, 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2008.

These books contain a great deal of distilled wisdom about software construction in general and Java best practices, technical details, and style issues. There will be assigned readings from these books during the quarter, and you will be required to complete short online quizzes from time to time about material that should be read before class. We can make much better use of class time if everyone has read the relevant sections ahead of time.

Besides the two required books, two additional books are listed for the course:

• Object-Oriented Design & Patterns by Cay Horstmann, 2nd ed, Wiley, 2006. This book is a good source of background information about software design, design patterns, and graphical user interfaces in Java. Not required, but helpful if you want more background than is usually found in technical reference documentation.
• Core Java Vol. I - Fundamentals by Cay Horstmann, 8th ed, Prentice-Hall, 2008. There are many Java reference books out there. You may not need to buy any of them or may prefer something else, but if you do want a "Java book" on your shelf this is a good one.

Approximate Topics (subject to change): We expect to cover the following topics, but not necessarily in this order.

• Reasoning about programs: pre- and post-conditions, invariants, and correctness
• Abstract data types, implementations, abstraction functions, representation invariants, notions of equality
• Java language issues: subclasses and subtypes, generics, exceptions, assertions, etc.
• Tools: Eclipse IDE, version control, svn
• Code quality, style, comments, documentation, JavaDoc
• Testing, test coverage, black- and white-box testing, test-first development, regression testing, JUnit
• Debugging strategies and tools
• Design: modular design, coupling, cohesion; design patterns; basic UML as a design notion
• User interfaces, callbacks, separation of model from view/control

	Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA  98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to Hal Perkins]