The course basically consists of doing a project on a topic that you
select by yourself. The project should investigate an advanced
principle or technology in software engineering. As part of doing the
project, you should present an initial literature survey in class.
The product of the project is an individual
report describing the literature that you have studied and any
experiments that you have performed.
Organization
Projects can be done in groups or individually. For group projects,
this means that you have to balance group work with individual
work, since you have to write your report individually. Survey
presentations can be done in groups, so long as each group member
takes part in the presentation.
Every topic will be associated with an advisor who will help the
participants in finding the right material and in working towards
relevant experiments.
Good to know
Here is a list of "good to know" items that have popped up during classes:
- When you do your presentations, you can also include a demo (but remember not to spend too long time).
- Presentations are time-boxed, normally to 30 minutes. One person doing a presentation is perfectly welcome
to use less time, but normally not less than 20 minutes. If you need more time, please talk to Ulrik. Presentations
exceeding the 30 minute slot may be abruptly terminated.
- Web references: these can be good to include in a presentation but can be more problematic in your report, where we prefer for you to use written/published articles. Wikipedia is sometimes good, but due to its evolving nature one should at the very latest put a date there. There are however many exceptions, such as specifications published on the web by well-recognized organizations, as well as on-line peer-reviewed journals. So this is by no means a strict rule, just something to keep in mind. If you do include a reference e.g. to the web site of a product, make the URL as short as possible.
Handing in your reports
Your reports are due Monday 7th of April 12:00. You hand in:
- A single physical copy of your report in Ulrik's mail box in front of the secretary's office
- An email to Ulrik with your report in electronic form, can include source code
For guidelines on what are the requirements on the report, please see
the report description.
Please note that the first SSE04 lecture is scheduled for Friday 4th
of April, and that it would be a bad idea to miss it. Keep in mind though
that to get a good start for SSE04 it would be better for you to have
finished up your SSE05 report before SSE04 starts...
Suggested project topics
As a project topic, I suggest choosing an advanced concept or
technology in software engineering. In principle, this is completely
open-ended. In practice, the topic has to be one where a teacher
associated with the course has enough expertise to easily serve as
advisor on the topic.
Links to information on various topics:
(This list is by no means exhaustive, it just contains things that
came to mind.) In addition, software architectural issues such as
object-oriented frameworks, component-based development, advanced
separation of concerns are also relevant (and we can help find
literature).