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Course Catalog:
Presents fundamental principles of software engineering. Emphasizes software design, implementation and maintenance. Techniques used in the major phases of the software life cycle such as rapid prototyping, object-oriented design and module testing, are discussed. Software teams complete a term project that includes system documentation, design and implementation. Falls.
Prereqs: CS 2381 and CS 3720.

Course Info #

• Instructor: Nat Tuck
  • Email: nathaniel.tuck@plymouth.edu
  • Office: D&M 305
• Course Site: https://homework.quest/ click “cs4140”
• Semester: Fall 2023 (Aug 28 - Dec 15)
• Lecture: Mon, Wed, Fri at 10:10am-11am in D&M 419
• Final Exam: Fri Dec 15th, 8am-10:30am in D&M 419
• Office Hours:
  • Mon 1-2pm @ D&M 305
  • Wed 9-10am @ D&M 305
  • By appointment

Student Learning Outcomes #

Successful students will:

• Work in a team to develop a complex web application.
• Publish the resulting application as a public git repository released under an open source license.
• Use a selection of specific tools, techniques, and methodologies for software engineering, software development, and project management.
• Engage in self-directed learning to gain knowlege and experience with new web development languages, frameworks, libraries, and tools.
• Discover project tasks and break large tasks down into smaller pieces.
• Contribute to allocation of tasks between team members then personally do a fair share of the work.
• Deploy to a commodity virtual private server.
• Collect and implement user stories from a person outside the team.

Texts #

There is no required textbook 🪳 for this course.

Course Supplies #

In an early task, each student will be required to purchase the following services and maintain them for remainder of the semester:

• A commodity virtual private server
• A domain name

This can be done for under $20 for the semester.

Please wait to get these until the task is assigned, as there are several specific requirements.

Software Project #

In this course you will work in a team to build a software project.

For the first phase of the course, we will introduce the tools and processes we will be using for development by working on a simple example application.

For the second phase of the course, each team will work on an application for a “customer” outside the team. These may be actual external people outside the class, it may just be the instructor, or it may be a mix of the two.

In this second phase, teams will use a simple agile methodology to make as much progress as they can on the application before the semester ends while following the class development policies. New development policies will be introduced in lectures throughout the semester.

A major focus of this class is on the elements of software development other than writing application code, so expect those things to take a significant portion of your time and effort in this class.

Grading #

The number of points available in an assessment may (or may not) exceed the denominator used in the grade calculation.

Letter grades

≥ 93 → A, ≥ 90 → A-,
≥ 87 → B+, ≥ 83 → B, ≥ 80 → B-,
≥ 77 → C+, ≥ 73 → C, ≥ 70 → C-,
≥ 67 → D+, ≥ 63 → D, ≥ 60 → D-,
else (< 60) → F

Team and Individual Reports

For this class you will be primarily working in a team of around 3-5 students. Your team will submit a weekly report answering questions and summarizing course work and progress. The team will get one grade on this report, reflecting an evaluation of both the report itself and the work it describes.

In addition to the weekly team report, each student will submit an individual report. Each student will recieve a grade on their own report, reflecting the report itself and their individual contributions as reported by themselves and their teammates.

Report templates will be provided through an online system called Inkfish. All assignments must be submitted through that system. Unsolicited emailed assignments will not be accepted.

Each week there may be assigned tasks or new project requirements which will be reported on in one or both of that week’s reports. Not doing the task or managing the requirement will lose you points. Claiming in a report that you did tasks or managed requirements when you did not loses double points.

Final Presentation

At the end of the semester each team will give a presentation on what they accomplished during the semester. The grade for this will cover both the presentation itself and the work it describes.

A component of this grade may be from peer evaluations.

Team Meeting Attendence

Class each Friday will include a mandatory team meeting. If we don’t have class Friday, the meeting is the following Monday.

Each student starts with four points. Unexcused absenses lose a point.

Example: Having 7 unexcused absences from team meetings gives you a score of -3 out of 4. So if you earn 100% in the other categories your final grade will be an 82.5.

Grade Appeals

If you think you recieved an incorrect grade, send me an email describing why your grade is wrong and how you think it should be corrected.

If the grade isn’t clearly wrong, I will ask you to stop by my office hours so we can discuss the issue in more detail.

Fair Grading Policy

All grading in this class is subject to the university Fair Grading Policy.

Late Work

Work submitted after the deadline loses 1% per hour late.

If you are unable to submit an assignment on time due to a circumstance covered by the university Excused Absence Policy then you can request an extension. If you are granted an extension and submit by the extended deadline then the late penalty will be removed. If such an extension could reasonably be requested before the assignment deadline then it must be.

Late Registration

If you register late for the course please contact the professor to discuss completing any missed assignments as soon as possible.

Course Evaluations

Course evaluations can be a valuable tool to determine how the semester went. They’re more useful with a higher response rate.

To encourage more responses, each class has the chance to earn a 1% bonus to everyone’s final grade. This bonus applies if at least 75% of the students complete their evaluations by 10am on the Monday of finals week.

Accomodations #

Plymouth State University is committed to providing students with documented disabilities equal access to all university programs and facilities. If you think you have a disability requiring accommodations, you should contact Campus Accessibility Services (CAS), located in Speare (535-3300) to determine whether you are eligible for such accommodations. Academic accommodations will only be considered for students who have registered with CAS. If you have authorized CAS to electronically deliver a Letter of Accommodations for this course, please communicate with your instructor to review your accommodations.

Academic Integrity #

Please carefully read and be familiar with the unversity Academic Integrity Policy. Especially don’t do any of the things in the list of examples of academic integrity violations.

For the projects in this class you will be developing software source code and making the results publicly available.

To avoid plagarism, the following are clearly OK:

• If a member of your team wrote code.
• If a member of your team generated boilerplate code with a non-AI code generation tool (e.g. scaffolding in Ruby on Rails).
• Using external open source libraries through package management tools.

Copying code from other sources is OK if you provide clear attribution and:

• The code is a documentation sample clearly intended to be adapted and used by developers.
• The code is licensed under an open source license compatible with your project license. Make sure to follow the license.
• Attribution should be identify the author if possible, how to find the resource (e.g. URL, book citation, etc), and any relevent licensing info.

Using code produced by generative AI is OK as long as:

• You specify what generative AI tool (e.g. name, url, version, date as appropriate) was used for what code.
• You include the full prompt, chat session, or whatever used to generate the code in a comment or in a documentation file.

Not OK:

• Copying code you didn’t produce yourself into your project without clear attribution.
• Copyright infringement (including for non-code assets)
• Getting people not on your team to write code for you or writing code for other teams, except in the case of an open source library included through a package manager.

Tentative Topics and Dates #

The initial plan is for reports to be due at 11:59pm on Monday.

• † No class on Monday (Labor Day)
• ‡ No class Wed, Thu, Fri (Thanksgiving)