You have a great deal of latitude in choosing your own toolset. Your team is ultimately responsible for choosing and learning these tools. That said, the staff wants to help you as much as possible, so if you are stuck, please ask us! However, be aware that we don't know every tool that you might choose. Your whole team should work together to choose, understand, and use your tools — just like in the real world. You should be, or become, comfortable with reading documentation that is sometimes incomplete or confusing, and with installing and using new software. These are skills that will stand you in good stead, no matter where your career takes you.
Integrated development hosting We strongly recommend using a site that integrates the most important development tools: version control, issue tracking, and wiki. The wiki is a good place to host your development homepage. We strongly recommand GitHub.
Version control We require that you use a distributed version control system, such as Git (recommended) or Mercurial.
Unix groups The staff will create a Unix group (for file system permissions) per team on request. This is mostly necessary for those using shared Unix hosting on cubist.cs.
Mailing list
We require that your team has a mailing list with archives. All CSE 403
staff members must have permission to post to your list and to read its
archives, but they should not receive email from your list.
You can create a team mailing list, with archives, through
Mailman/C&C,
Google Groups, and similar
services.
We recommend you use the above toolchains rather than the ones in this section.
Integrated development hosting If you do not want to use Github, other sites such as SourceForge, Google Code, and Bitbucket provide similar functionality. Or, you can build your own development toolset, using the parts listed below.
Version control Mercurial and Git are installed at CSE, and you can also set up a private repository at CSE if you prefer not to use Google Code or other hosting providers. Ask the course staff for details.
Wiki A wiki is a lightweight way for a group to share notes. Many code hosting services, including Google Code, also provide a wiki.
Defect tracking The staff will set up one Bugzilla instance for each team who requests it.
Here are tools you can use to draw UML diagrams.
The CSE lab machines have a full complement of development environments/tools, including most or all of the following.
IDEs eclipse
compilers/interpreters C, C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby(-on-rails), etc.
unit test frameworks
Java: JUnit, TestNG, JUnitEE
JavaScript: JsUnit
C# and .NET: NUnit, csUnit
C: CUnit
PHP: PHPUnit, SimpleTest; CakePHP incorporates its own unit testing primitives
Ruby: Test::Unit, RSpec, ZenTest
Python: PyUnit
other testing tools Selenium for replay of user actions (e.g., clicks) in a browser
code coverage NoUnit, EMMA, Cobertura, Hansel, etc.
If you use Microsoft Windows on your personal computer, Cygwin might be helpful in interoperating with software hosted on CSE Unix machines (such as version control repositories).
You may use any programming language you like. However, your project must obey professional standards of modularity and abstraction. Some languages make this very difficult to guarantee, and we strongly recommend against them.
If you need additional resources (a mobile phone, Amazon Web Services credit, software installed on attu or cubist, etc.), please tell the staff as soon as possible. We will do our best to accommodate such requests, but cannot make any guarantees.
It is required that your team project can be installed, by a staff member, on a fresh CSE virtual machine image (or on other readily available resources such as attu, cubist, or Amazon Web Services). If you have written a mobile device app, it must run both on an emulator and on some mobile device, but it does not have to run on arbitrary mobile devices.