Software Engineering

About This Course

• Make you a better programmer
• Prepare you for industry
• Prepare you for Capstone
• Prepare you for Academia

Why Is Programming Hard?

• Figuring stuff out
• People

Software Engineering Is Engineering

• Engineering is a four-step process:

  • What are you going to build? (requirements)
  • How are you going to build it? (design)
  • Build it (implementation)
  • Is it built right? (validation and verification)

• Engineering is interdisciplinary

• Engineering is two-tiered:

  • Project: Actually constructing the necessary artifact
  • Process: Managing the work of constructing the artifact

• Engineering is about risk management

  • What are the likelihoods of various risks?
  • What are the consequences of various risks?
  • How do risks interact?

Software Engineering Is Weird Engineering

• Extraordinarily complex artifacts

  • Other fields are complicated only as software enables this

• Bits are not atoms

  • Product is infinitely perfectly replicable and distributable instantly at zero cost
  • Wear and tear are not a thing

• Software doesn't exist by itself

  • Software-intensive systems

Software Engineering Is New

• Didn't exist until about 50 years ago

  • Wasn't a real thing until about 40 years ago

• Tremendous (though slowing) pace of change

• Still highly failure-prone

What Does This All Mean To You?

• You (supposedly) know how to program at this point. Gratz

• What do you still need to learn?

  • End-to-end engineering
  • How use / manage process
  • How to work with people
  • How to manage large scale complexity
  • How to manage risk
  • How to manage rapid change

• There's only so much I can tell you

  • We only know so much
  • I only know so much
  • Much of it isn't well-written-down