Student Blogs
MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog
 | Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff. |
 | Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography. |
 |
Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs. |
 |
Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music. |
 | Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies. |
Monday, September 17, 2007
Software Metrics Before and After (Part I)
You may recall that there are two tracks within the MS Software Engineering program at Carnegie Mellon West, the Technical Track (which I’m in) and the Development Management Track. During our first year, the classes were combines – since, regardless of track – we needed to have the same foundation of software knowledge. Now, as we enter our second year, our curriculum splits according to track. Those who aspire to be Software Architects continue on the Technical Track, while those who aspire to be development managers continue on the Development Management Track.
For me, that means that I will be joining the folks who have opted to stay close to coding, designing and architecting. I am actually quite surprised by the small number of students going to the Technical Track—we are only ten students. The remaining 30+ students decided to be dev managers, I suppose.
This semester starts out with a 7-week class on “Metrics for Software Engineers”, a problem-based learning approach to analyze, learn, and understand metrics commonly used in software engineering, as well as actually propose software metrics to common problems and case studies. Honestly, I never realized that software metrics could be a topic of its own, and especially given my bias that software metrics is not very technical in nature, I must admit that I am currently a bit skeptical of the applicability of this class to my development and growth. However, I’ll shall keep my eyes and mind open as I participate in class.
What I understand so far (very little) is that Software Metrics is a topic that encompasses the art of defining units and process of measurements related to software engineering for the purpose of improving the success of the project. I suppose this would be things such as bug count, lines of code, the rate of actual bug count decrease vs. expected, the glide path of test cases performed before shipping a product. To me, it doesn’t sound like a topic that is very in-depth or insightful to a software engineer , so I hope that this class can convince me otherwise.
Logistically, the class is structured differently from previous semesters. First of all, while our first-year classes were all 14 weeks long (standard semester length), this class is only 7 weeks long, which means it will go by very quick. Secondly, we are stepping out-of-story. This means that our faculty will simply be themselves, and won’t pretend to be some VP of Engineering of some fictitious company. Lastly, and this is probably the most significant change, the class uses a problem-based learning approach. We will look at case studies and problems, and as a team of ten students we come up with questions that we need to answer ourselves, find our own readings, do our own research and discuss readings in a plenary group, as we come up with proposals ourselves and critique each other on the proposals. It will take a lot of student initiation, which means we have the power to drive the class direction, while of course still being guided by our faculty.
Let’s see what this class has to offer.
posted by Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley @ 2:57 PM
0 comments
