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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. |
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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. |
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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, November 19, 2007
Foundations of Software Engineering – Getting into the good stuff
Ah, how time flies when you're busy. It seems like just yesterday I was starting out and getting to know my team. However, just last Saturday we performed a demo to our Marketing VP (one of the faculty members) that showed off almost all the functionality he was interested in. So we're into the home stretch with a pretty good idea of where to go.
For some background, the first course, Foundations of Software Engineering, consists of taking a piece of existing code and upgrading it with new functionality. We have taken a basic project management tool (actually the results of last year's students' work in this course) and added the capability for it to associate tasks with specific users, log time against tasks, show reports, and show a personal to-do list of the things a specific user needs to see. We've been actually coding over the course of two three-week iterations so far, with one more to come.
We're nearly done with the basic requirements, so this upcoming iteration I'll be able to spend some time untangling and refactoring the code in some areas to make it more maintainable and understandable (possibly even testable). The rest of the team will be polishing up the UI and functionality based on the VP of Marketing's feedback on how he wants the end result to look.
I'm definitely understanding a lot more of what goes into a project – how the decisions you make to start with are rarely 100% correct. We've been splitting up some of the work in non-optimal ways over the past iterations which we are hoping we can rectify with our work on the upcoming one. I'm sure that even then, we'll be able to look back and reflect on some ways to improve. I plan on breaking down the structure of the first course in its entirety once I'm finished, but if there are any specific topics anyone is interested in, feel free to leave it as a comment and let me know.
posted by Nick Lynn @ 11:50 AM
- Kicking off the Construction class - woohoo!
- Software Metrics Before and After (Part II)
- Just Getting Started here at Carnegie Mellon West!
- May I present to you… Scotland Yard?
- Software Metrics Before and After (Part I)
- Software Architecture Before and After (Part III)
- Balancing school and work
- Spending a 2 ½ week vacation in Europe in your 1-w...
- Software Architecture Before and After (Part II)
- The New Software Industry and other networking opp...
I was just curious which programming language/s you have been using, and would it be possible to post a snapshot or two of the final product main UI? I'm finishing a BS in IT at USF, and I'm strongly considering applying to CMU- possibly West Campus.
-Jessie Jones
jessierjones@gmail.com