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. |
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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. |
Friday, April 18, 2008
Requirements Engineering - Second semester wrap-up
This semester was definitely a remarkable change of pace from the first one. In the first one, we took one course, Foundations of Software Engineering. It had mainly been focused on things that I already understood, like coding and some design patterns. This semester was something else entirely. We took a course called Requirements Engineering. We focused on gathering requirements and then prioritizing them for a release. I have never done anything like this before, even at my day job at Google. I learned how to conduct user interviews, how to do UI design, how to develop use cases, how to do usability tests, and how to prioritize and maintain requirements as they change. In addition, we had excellent readings and discussion on how to improve meetings, with the wonderfully named Death by Meeting as an introduction to the problem. This course's newness to me really made it significantly more mentally challenging than the previous course. I'm very excited that I've actually learned some things about how to design features that users will actually want instead of those that engineers think they want.
Specifically, we worked on a movie recommendation product that would leverage social networking to give people personalized recommendations. At least, that's how it began. During user interviews, nobody we interviewed said they would bother figuring out yet another social network. So we had to push back on our VP of Marketing (role-played by one of our faculty members) to revise the vision from a social network like Facebook or Myspace to one where the social network was one-way. That is, you could look at another user's reviews and say you agree with that user, but the other person has no need to know who you are or approve you. Then, a personalized recommendation can be built based on your history and those of the users you agree with. That let us build a system more like Amazon's recommendations but for movies instead of something like a Myspace for movies. The whole process was really interesting.
Looking into the future, we have the Gathering coming up, where all the students fly in to Carnegie Mellon West and meet up in person. This will include my teammate from this semester who consistently dialed in from
posted by Nick Lynn @ 10:30 AM
- Construction III – The Best of All Worlds
- Construction II – Wrapping Up Thick Client Develop...
- Construction II – Building a Thick Client for the ...
- Once More unto the Breach
- Wrapping up Construction I – Wohoo!
- A whirlwind semester draws to a close
- Ruby on Rails – where hast thou been all my life?
- Foundations of Software Engineering – Getting into...
- Kicking off the Construction class - woohoo!
- Software Metrics Before and After (Part II)
