Special exciting first week!

Unfortunately, I will miss the first week of class (since I am presenting a paper at the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering). So we're going to make the first week a little different than usual, in a couple of ways. In particular, you'll use the time to perform a small design and implementation project that is your first assignment. (Readings and a second assignment will commence shortly after I return, the second Monday of the quarter.)

• The first day of lecture (March 25) you will be given a specification of a reasonably small system. You will immediately form groups-preferably of three people, but two is permitted depending on the class size-that will over the following week design, implement and present a review of your design.

• During the first lecture on Monday, you'll break into these groups and read over the specification of the system, interactively asking Kingsum for clarifications and such.

• Before the second lecture on Wednesday, each group will start sketching a design for the system. At the second lecture, Kingsum will answer any remaining questions about the specification and will then go from group to group to informally chat about their planned design.

• Between Wednesday and the following Monday, each group will complete the design, write and test an implementation in the language of your choice, and prepare a five minute presentation of your design to present on Monday (my first day back).

• I will focus on two key issues after each design presentation on Monday: one, in what ways, if any, did you modify your design after you had decided it was stable (and which of these ways, if any, were due to your choice of implementation language); and two, how robust is your design with respect to various changes (ranging from changes in the specification to changes in the underlying data structures and algorithms).

• Your presentation should not focus on these questions, it should instead focus on conveying to Kingsum, me, and the other students precisely what your design is. Plan the presentation, because it will be painfully obvious if you haven't done so.

• On Friday, Kingsum will show a videotape of Fred Brooks' keynote talk at last year's 17th International Conference on Software Engineering. This will be held in Sieg 422, not in Guggenheim. It's a little longer than an hour, so if you can, try to arrange it so you can stay past 11:30AM.

I confess that this is an experiment. But I'm hoping that it will give you a chance to seriously think about design and some key relationships that design has to programming languages and to the ease of change. When I get back, we'll start a more scholarly study of design and the literature about it. For now, just focus on the design and implementation and on your insights about it. Have fun!