Calendar

Week 1

Sep 6

Introduction: No reading, but you should come to class (even if you’re on the waitlist) to do an in-class activity. If you’re unable to come to class (e.g., you’re sick), email me - the activity can also be completed remotely, and it’s important that everyone does it.

Sep 8

Code-level Design: Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s The Joel Test (note that this article is from 2000, so the examples are a little dated) and Triglia’s Why you should use Black for your Python style linting
Your Choice reading: Ajami et al.’s Syntax, predicates, idioms — what really affects code complexity?

Week 2

Sep 11

Individual Project 0 due

Sep 13

Testing (1): Mandatory reading: Shore’s The Art of Agile Development: Test-Driven Development
Your Choice reading: Saff and Ernst’s An Experimental Evaluation of Continuous Testing During Development

Sep 15

Testing (2): Mandatory reading: Petrovic’s Mutation Testing
Your Choice reading: Memon et al.’s Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing

Week 3

Sep 20

Testing (3): Mandatory reading: SQLite’s How SQLite is Tested
Your Choice reading: Barr et al.’s The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A Survey

Sep 22

Version Control: Mandatory reading: Ernst’s Version control concepts and best practices
Your Choice reading: De Rosso et al.’s Purposes, concepts, misfits, and a redesign of git

Week 4

Sep 25

Individual Project 1 due

Sep 27

Requirements and Specifications (1): Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s How to be a Program Manager and the Group Project Specification
Your Choice reading: Ernst et al.’s The Daikon system for dynamic detection of likely invariants

Sep 27

Project Formation survey due

Sep 29

Requirements and Specifications (2): Mandatory reading: Wayne’s Using Formal Methods at Work
Your Choice reading: Lamport’s Introduction to TLA

Week 5

Oct 4

Process: Mandatory reading: The Agile Manifesto (this should take under a minute to read, but I suggest you think about what it is advocating for at least a few minutes before moving onto the next article) and Hosking’s Agile Projects Have Become Waterfall Projects With Sprints.
Your Choice reading: Anda et al.’s Variability and Reproducibility in Software Engineering: A Study of Four Companies that Developed the Same System

Oct 6

Working in Teams: Mandatory reading: Jackson’s The Google Technical Interview and the Individual Project 2 Specification
Your Choice reading: Behroozi et al.’s Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews?

Week 6

Oct 9

Project Plan due

Oct 11

Code Review: Mandatory reading: Google’s How to do a code review (read all six linked sub-pages in the bulleted list)
Your Choice reading: Bacchelli and Bird’s Expectations, Outcomes, and Challenges Of Modern Code Review

Oct 13

Languages: Mandatory reading: Howarth’s Why Discord is Switching from Go to Rust
Your Choice reading: Hoare’s Hints on Programming Language Design (shorter than it looks!)

Week 7

Oct 16

Individual Project 2 due

Oct 18

Build Systems: Mandatory reading: Atwood’s The F5 Key Is Not a Build Process
Your Choice reading: Mokhov et al.’s Build Systems à la Carte

Oct 20

Static Analysis (1): Mandatory reading: Ayewah et al.’s Experiences Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs
Your Choice reading: Bessey et al.’s A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World

Week 8

Oct 23

Revised Project Plan due

Oct 25

Static Analysis (2): Mandatory reading: Schwartz-Narbonne’s How to integrate formal proofs into software development
Your Choice reading: Chapter 2 (“Abstract Interpretation”) of Ernst’s Notes on Program Analysis

Oct 27

Mid-term Exam (in-class): see the exams page for old and practice exams (with keys)

Week 9

Nov 1

Debugging (1): Mandatory reading: Zeil’s Debugging – Using Hypotheses to Track Down the Culprit
Your Choice reading: Ko and Myers’ Designing the WhyLine: A Debugging Interface for Asking Questions about Program Behavior

Nov 3

Debugging (2): Mandatory reading: Zeller’s Automated Debugging: Are We Close?
Your Choice reading: Cleve and Zeller’s Locating Causes of Program Failures

Nov 3

Project Wizard-of-Oz Demo due

Week 10

Nov 8

Software Architecture (1): Mandatory reading: Kästner’s Thinking Like a Software Architect and Ross’ How Architecture Diagrams Enable Better Conversations
Your Choice reading: Garlan’s Software Architecture

Nov 10

Software Architecture (2): Mandatory reading: Fowler’s Writing Software Patterns (read up to, but not including, “Common Pattern Forms”) and Lewis and Fowler’s Microservices
Your Choice reading: Kellogg et al.’s Verifying Object Construction

Week 11

Nov 15

Tech debt, refactoring, and maintenance (1): Mandatory reading: Allman’s Managing Technical Debt
Your Choice reading: Kim et al.’s A Field Study of Refactoring Challenges and Benefits

Nov 17

Tech debt, refactoring, and maintenance (2): Mandatory reading: Spolsky’s Things you should never do, part I and Prokopov’s Software disenchantment
Your Choice reading: Malkawi’s The art of software systems development: Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Performance (RAMP) (read up through the 4 “Cases” and then skip to and read the Discussion)

Week 12

Nov 22

DevOps (1): Mandatory reading: Sloss’ “Introduction” and Baye’s “Emergency Response” from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering
Your Choice reading: Dean and Barroso’s “The Tail at Scale”

Nov 24

No class (Thanksgiving holiday)

Week 13

Nov 29

DevOps (2): Mandatory reading: Lunney and Lueder’s “Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure” from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering and Luu’s “Postmortem Lessons”
Your Choice reading: Xu et al.’s “Do Not Blame Users for Misconfiguration”

Dec 1

Free and Open-source Software: Mandatory reading: Stallman’s Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
Your Choice reading: Terrell et al.’s Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men

Dec 1

Project Preliminary Demo due

Week 14

Dec 6

In-class Project Workday (Martin is traveling at FSE)

Mandatory reading: none

Your Choice reading: none

Totally Optional, For Fun Readings: Gross’ The Grug Brained Developer and Kingsbury’s Reversing the technical interview

Dec 8

What is Software Engineering?: Mandatory reading: Shaw’s “What makes good research in software engineering?”
Your Choice reading: read 10 abstracts in the latest ICSE proceedings and make a list of words you don’t know. Then, look up at least 5 of those words and write a brief definition. Send me the list of words, the 5 definitions, and the titles of the papers whose abstracts you read over email. (The reading quiz question for this reading will cover a topic that everyone who chooses this reading has read.)

Week 15

Dec 12: All group project final deliverables due
Dec 13: Group project presentations, all final deliverables due BEFOREHAND. Attendence (in-person) is required. At least one group member must bring a laptop with a working demo of your group project (running in a publicly-accessible, deployed covey.town instance).

Week 16

Exam Slot (Dec 18, 11:30am, TIER 114)
Dec 18: All group project final deliverables (re-submission) due
Dec 19: Individual Reflection due