Course syllabus

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DAT265 / DIT588 DAT265 / DIT588 

Software evolution project lp1 HT22 (15 hp)

The course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering

Course purpose

The aim of this course is for students to synthesize and apply the knowledge achieved from previous compulsory courses in the program, and learn about and deal with the activities occurring after the initial product release in software development. The purpose of this course is to familiarize the student with situations, activities, and techniques typical for software evolution, such as adding a new feature, refactoring, automating variability or testing, improving performance, re-balancing non-functional requirements, and so on. Furthermore, students learn to plan, implement, and reflect on software evolution scenarios and improvements.

Schedule

The detailed schedule can be found on the course schedule page 

We will have some workshops and supervision meetings every Tuesday and Friday in the mornings. Thus, these are the times you should schedule for the course. There will of course be additional meetings within your team, but this is something you are free to agree upon within the team.

Course literature

Please, find the list of course literature here.

Learning objectives and syllabus

Learning objectives (after completion of the course the student should be able to):

Knowledge and understanding
  • explain the notion of software evolution scenarios as defined by the Architecture Driven Modernization (ADM) task force of the Object Management Group (OMG),
  • summarize state of the art in methods and tools for software evolution tasks, such as program comprehension and software refactoring,
  • discuss the challenges associated with software evolution,
  • explain current research trends in program comprehension, clone detection, and refactoring.
Skills and abilities
  • extract a software product's architecture from a given code base and evaluate the quality of the software product,
  • implement one software evolution scenario as defined by the OMG, such as platform or language migration,
  • implement changes to a software product that lead to an improvement of the product's quality (quality improvement task),
  • make use of synergies between different improvement goals for the same product.
Judgement and approach
  • detect and judge needs for quality improvement or evolution in an authentic software product,
  • plan the use of appropriate methods and techniques for performing a software evolution scenario and a quality improvement task,
  • judge needs for improvement of methods and tools to support software evolution,
  • plan and evaluate ideas for new or improved tools.

 

The course is a joint course (Chalmers and Göteborgs Universitet):

Course design and examination form

Detailed information on the course design and examination can be found here.

Communication between teachers and students takes place via Canvas and  e-mail.

Project assignments and guidelines for reporting can be found in the Modules.

 

Changes made since the last occasion

The main change made since the last occasion concerns the selected project. 

For early planners

Teamwork: Teamwork will play a big role in this project course. To prepare for that:

  • We recommend you to read the following paper before the course starts (8 pages): Wolfe, J., & Powell, E. (2014, October). Strategies for dealing with slacker and under-performing teammates in class projects. In Professional Communication Conference (IPCC), 2014 IEEE International (pp. 1-8). IEEE. You find a PDF in the internal pages.
  • We plan to have teams of 5 students. This year you are asked to choose all team members yourself. So, please, feel free to go ahead and match yourself with some classmates. When doing so, please, consider your own timing constraints (e.g. what are the other courses you are planning to take?) and make sure to form teams that can meet on a regular basis - also outside the times scheduled for workshops and supervision meetings. All teams that are smaller than 5 students should be prepared to take in additional students. More details can be soon be found on the internal pages.
  • Compile the Github project being used for the course on your machine. Look up the projects' documentation and Continuous Integration workflows (.github/workflows) on how to do that.

Looking forward to seeing you in the course!

 

Course summary:

Date Details Due