Ronald Mak

Department of Computer Science
Spring Semester 2008

Office hours:	Tuesdays and Thursdays, 5:30 – 6:45 pm
Office location:	Duncan Hall, room 282
E-mail:	mak@cs.sjsu.edu (e-mail preferred over phone)
Phone:	(408) 533-2726 (cell)
Websites:	www.apropos-logic.com www.willardlowe.com

 

Announcement archive

• Problem statement for each project (due Tuesday, Feb. 5): Follow the example in the textbook, Figure 4-17. At this stage, you will have only the most high-level functional and non-functional requirements (at most a half dozen of each type) -- you'll gather more when you've completed your first set of project use cases. Your problem statement will probably be closer to 2 pages than 4.
   
• Initial set of use cases for each project (due Thursday, Feb. 7): Decide on the 10 to 12 most important use cases. Draw a UML use case diagram that includes all of them, and then write a description for each one.
   
• A major portion of the course will be on software design, especially object-oriented design. Each team is free to choose how to implement its software product, but be sure that you'll be able to document excellent object-oriented design techniques in at least some of your components. So you should choose a good OO language for those components.
   
• Don't make it too hard on yourselves! Yes, your software product should be substantial, but not so complex that you won't be able to achieve your early milestones by the end of the semester. Note that each team must demo some product functionality at the end of the semester.
   
• New book discoveries:
   
  • Dan Pilone and Russ Miles, Head First Software Development, O'Reilly, 2008. Like the other books in the Head First series, this one is informal, fun to read, a bit irreverent, but very informative. Covers much of the material in CS 160.
  • Michael Schmidt, Implementing the IEEE Software Engineering Standards, Sams Publishing, 2000. Yes, the IEEE SE standards are so complicated that it takes a separate book to explain them.