This module will introduce students to the principles of software engineering, discussing the software lifecycle and approaches to effective teamwork. Students will be introduced to a development framework, which they will work on individually, and then will apply the principles of software engineering, working in a team to develop a software project.

• Programming assignment, group requirements specification document and team project.
• The module has the explicit objective of developing group teamwork skills. Participation in teamwork is mandatory, and absence will result in loss of marks and eventually loss of credits.
• The group teamwork project cannot be repeated within the academic year. Failure will normally result in you repeating the year.

• Blackboard
• Unconfirmed practical marks when available

The aims of this module are to develop in candidates:

• an ability to implement well-structured and maintainable code in a given framework;
• an understanding of basic software engineering methodologies and software project management;
• an understanding of software engineering processes, including requirements capture, development, testing and maintenance, and the ability to carry out these processes as part of a team.

By the end of the module, the student will be able to:

• Implement solutions to simple problems in the provided framework, demonstrating principles of readability and maintainability as well as correctness;
• Demonstrate how HTML and CSS can be used to present and style information;
• Work in a team to gather and formalise requirements in terms of user stories for a website software system;
• Work in a team to implement, refactor, and test a software system;
• Explain the principles of software testing and how to improve code quality (e.g., through refactoring), drawing upon examples from the team project;

Semester 1:

• Introduction (What Software Engineering is, course structure)
• Software lifecycle (Processes, Agile)
• Project management (Projects, processes, people, products)
• Software configuration management (Version and change control)
• Requirements engineering
• Metrics and estimation
• HTML and CSS 
• Basic programing in Ruby

Semester 2:

• Software architectures and the web
• Engineering a data-driven website
• Designing and incorporating a database into a software system
• Software testing
  
• Software maintenance

Feedback is available through help given by demonstrators and lecturers at lab classes; through team supervision meetings (semester 2 only); from comments given on marked assignments, and more general class feedback given in lectures.