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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

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.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Once More unto the Breach


Well, a new semester has just begun here (well, it began two weeks ago, but close enough.) The course for this semester is Requirements Engineering, which is gathering and deciding on requirements for a product. In our case, this is a movie recommender. Imagine Netflix meets RottenTomatoes meets Amazon (or something close).


I'm on a team with one of the same teammates as last semester, a coworker at Google, and a student in Saudi Arabia (complete with an 11 hour time difference). For at least the first few weeks, I'm the group leader, which is more challenging than I'd thought initially. Still, I think the team overall is pretty solid, and we've had effective meetings so far. I'm not quite sure how my Saudi Arabian teammate manages to wake up early for some of the meetings, but he has definitely been a key member of the group. We're gathering our own ideas for the product now and will soon be conducting user interviews to refine and obtain even more potential requirements for the final product.

The culmination of the work for the first half-semester will be a rough UI design, as well as a comprehensive list of user stories and scenarios that help to define the project. I'm excited as this is not anything I've ever done before. I hope it gives me a great deal of new insight on a reasonable way to gather requirements when I need to do it professionally.

So, while my school routine is back up and running, my job is giving me even more to do, and some kind of demolition is occurring at 7:30 AM underneath the apartment where I sleep, I think I can keep things under control (and the demolitions should be done by this weekend) and am looking forward to getting this semester underway.

posted by Nick Lynn @ 9:58 AM 

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