Course syllabus

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Course-PM

DAT680 / DIT005 DAT680 / DIT005 Special topics in software engineering lp2 HT25 (7.5 hp)

Course is offered by the department of Computer Science and Engineering

Contact details

Examiner:

Philipp Leitner (philipp.leitner@Chalmers.se) - main contact point for the course

Co-Teacher:

Lirong (Esme) Yi (lirong.yi@Chalmers.se) - responsible for topics surrounding compiler optimization

Course purpose

The field of software engineering is evolving rapidly, with new technologies, development methods, and organizational processes emerging on a regular basis. This course is a seminar-style course intended to enable students to explore topics within the field of software engineering.

This year, the topical focus of the course is on software performance engineering.

Schedule

See homepage

Course literature

The course requires students to search for and read academic literature related to their assigned seminar topic. No upfront literature list is provided.

Course design

Students primarily work offline on their own seminar topic, and receive weekly formative feedback from the instructors. There are four mandatory submissions:

(1) Submission of proposed chapter outline and literature list (1.12.)

(2) Submission of chapter draft for review (15.12.)

(3) Submission of peer reviews (19.12.)

(4) Submission of final chapters and class slides (7.1.)

Changes made since the last occasion

This is the first occurrence of this course.

Learning objectives and syllabus

Learning objectives:

Knowledge and Understanding
  • Describe existing techniques, tools, and methods within software engineering and their relation to presented research
  • Summarize and contrast recent relevant software engineering research
Skills and Abilities
  • Read research papers on software engineering, present their content, and critically discuss the presented motivation, research design, and findings
  • Examine new software engineering knowledge and relate it to past knowledge as well as knowledge presented in this course
  • Identify meaningful future extensions for software engineering research
Judgement Ability and Approach
  • Judge the limitations of state-of-the-art software engineering research
  • Assess potential biases and ethical issues affecting software engineering research

Link to the syllabus on Studieportalen.

Examination form

Only peer reviews, final chapters, and slides are graded. If revisions are required to one or multiple of these graded artifacts to reach a grade 3, students can re-submit up to two times within 3 months after course end (the final class presentations represent the end of the course). Submissions cannot reach a grade 5 after re-submission. Graded artifacts that reach a passing grade cannot be re-submitted (no plussning).

Grading guidelines:

Grade U: there are substantial weaknesses in one or multiple of the group or team's submitted artifacts, and/or the group or student has missed mandatory meetings unexcused. An incomplete list of "substantial weaknesses" in this context includes: submitting an incomplete draft, submitting a draft that is very short or not based on relevant scientific literature, submitting a draft that indicates that the group or student has not actually read the papers (e.g., key papers are entirely misrepresented in the text, AI-hallucinated references, etc.), submitting a draft that has major gaps in key concepts of the assigned topics, etc.

If the report is graded as U, the instructors reserve the right to ask for either an improved resubmission or the production of a new text on a new topic. The latter applies in particular to cases where substantial parts of the report appear AI-generated (in violation of the course's AI policy).

Grade 3: the group or student has submitted and presented a decent chapter, has given peer review feedback that indicates that they read and understood the other student's chapters, and has submitted decent class presentation slides; the group or student has attended all mandatory meetings. A decent chapter in this context covers the assigned topic in appropriate detail and without major omissions or errors, but has noticeable weaknesses in synthesis or writing.

Grade 4: the group or student has submitted and presented a good or very good chapter, has given useful review feedback that indicates that they read and understood the other student's chapters and proposed insightful feedback, and has submitted good and educational class presentation slides; the group or student has participated actively in class sessions.

Grade 5: the group or student has submitted artifacts and participated in class as per Grade 4, but additionally also has demonstrated some limited-scale practical work in their topic (e.g., written some example benchmarks, or constructed a queueing model for a system). What kind of practical work is useful depends on the assigned topic, and should be discussed with the instructors upfront.

Course summary:

Date Details Due