Class Meetings: Monday - Wednesday, 3:30 - 5:00 PM, BEL 116
I depend substantially on e-mail to communicate with students in the class. Following established University policy, I will be sending e-mail messages to your university sponsored e-mail account. It is your responsibility to check your e-mail account frequently or set up the account so that it forwards your e-mail to an account you do read frequently.
| Session Coverage | Assigned Activities |
| Status Reports | Hours Worked |
| DTS Operational Specification Ver 1.2 4/8/05 | DTS Operational Specification Ver 1.1 2/7/05 |
| DTS Operational Specification Ver 1.0 2/1/05 |
CS 480 has changed! If you've been in our program for a few semesters you've probably heard stories about the course, the amount of work involved, the large percentage of time spent on document preparation, and the relatively small amount of time spent on coding and testing as you define and develop a unique product for your customer. Let me assure you that there will still be a lot of work, there will still be documents to produce, and you get plenty of opportunity to do coding and testing. What is different is that we are no longer having you do an individual project for an outside customer. Instead we have you working in a more controlled environment and will make all of the work clearly relevant to a solid engineering approach to software product development. We are also going to focus on the application of sound software engineering principles as you move through the various activities it takes to build a reliable product. You will still be doing individual work, but you may be doing the same work as other students and there will be a lot more interaction with other students in the class.
CS 480 is a course that will place significant emphasis on your professional development. In your "standard" university courses you have reading assignment, small to moderately sized homework assignments, quizzes and exams, etc. Most of these activities involve some kind of written material to guide you progress. With a professional development focus, things are considerably different in CS 480. Some assignments will be given to you verbally. Some activities will be given in generalities or outline form from which you will be expected to develop a reasonable response or course of action. You will be expected to ask questions when you don't understand what's expected or wanted. If your work does not measure up you may be asked to do it again. In CS 480 you will be expected to manage your own time much more so than in any previous course you've probably taken. Procrastination is your enemy. You will make decisions, some technical and some non-technical, that you will have to live with.
Most software development that occurs today leverages an existing set of code so it's important to be able to dig into a system written by someone else and be able to understand it. The project we select may be based on a project from an earlier semester or from another course. During the early part of the semester we will be concentrating on understanding and documenting the operational characteristics of the application we will develop, then move on to creating and documenting the functional characteristics (design), and then finally doing the implementation. Implementation will be followed by thorough testing. When applicable we will study existing documentation and code, then reverse engineering the product if need be to produce a complete and accurate set of specifications. The specifications you develop will be used during the latter part of the semester as the base from which you will define, design, implement, and test changes to provide enhanced capabilities to the product.
In making this fairly significant change to CS
480, I don't want you to think that I have all the answers about what's going
to happen during the semester. In fact I am looking forward to a modest degree
of experimentation and the uncertainty that it brings. Some of what I try may
work fine, some may not. When it doesn't I'll make adaptations and try again.
Anyway, that's pretty much how real world project proceed.
Instructor Contact Information
| Bill Junk | Computer Science Dept., University of Idaho, Janssen Engr Bldg 324, PO Box 441010, Moscow, ID 83844-1010 |
| Telephone: 208-885-7530 | |
| Fax: 208-885-9052 | |
| E- Mail: billjunk@cs.uidaho.edu |