Handout A3: Objectives and Outcomes

Objectives

The course covers a wide range of software development concepts, abilities, and skills, from analyzing a problem to implementing a solution. On completion of the course, students should be able to

1. Analyze a software development problem and express its essence succinctly and precisely;
2. Design a module structure to solve a problem, and evaluate alternatives;
3. Implement a module so that it executes efficiently and correctly;
4. Appreciate engineering issues in the development of software, such as the importance of addressing the user's concerns, working with limited resources, maintainability, dependability, and division of labor.

Prerequisites

The course assumes that the student is conversant with Java and is able to

1. Write a small (e.g., 100 line) program to meet a specification;
2. Understand basic notions of imperative programming (such as loops, procedures, exceptions, and aliasing) and of object-oriented programming (such as objects, references, self, interfaces, and subclassing);
3. Use, and understand programs that use, basic data structures such as arrays, hash tables, trees and lists.

Outcomes

On completion of the course, students should be able to

1. Identify key entities and relationships in the problem domain; write succinct textual descriptions of problems in the style of a user manual;
2. Design programs:
   • Construct a design consisting of a collection of modules, ;
   • Exploit well-known design patterns (such as Iterator, Observer, Factory and Visitor);
   • Devise appropriate module specifications and express them informally in terms of pre- and post-conditions;
   • Understand the appropriate roles of subtyping and inheritance, and use them effectively.
3. Implement programs:
   • Write object-oriented code to satisfy the specification of a module;
   • Express representation invariants, understand their impact on efficiency and ease of implementation, and implement them as run-time assertions;
   • Understand the fundamental notions of data abstraction, and read and write informal abstraction functions for simple datatypes;
   • Evaluate the correctness of a module by careful manual review using the specification, rep invariant and abstraction function; and
   • Develop unit and system-level test suites, and evaluate their effectiveness using simple notions of specification and code coverage.