6.170 / Spring 2001 / Objectives and Outcomes

Handout A6

Objectives

1. Analyze a software development problem and express its essence succinctly and precisely;
2. Design a module structure to solve a problem, and evaluate alternatives;
3. Implement a module so that it executes efficiently and correctly;
4. Work in a small team, cooperating on these aspects of software development, and exchanging ideas in a constructive and organized fashion;
5. Appreciate engineering issues in the development of software, such as the importance of addressing the user's concerns, working with limited resources, maintainability, dependability, and division of labor.

Prerequisites

1. Write a small (ie, 100 line) program to meet a specification;
2. Understand basic notions of imperative programming (such as loops, procedures, exceptions, and aliasing) and of object-oriented programming (such as objects, references, self, interfaces, and subclassing);
3. Use, and understand programs that use, basic data structures such as arrays, hash tables, trees and lists.

Outcomes

1. Identify key entities and relationships in the problem domain; write succinct textual descriptions of problems in the style of a user manual;
2. Design programs:
   • Construct a design consisting of a collection of modules, using module dependency diagrams to express and evaluate couplings between modules, and object models to relate concrete to abstract state;
   • Exploit well-known design patterns (such as Iterator, Observer, Factory and Visitor);
   • Devise appropriate module specifications and express them informally in terms of pre- and post-conditions;
   • Understand the appropriate roles of subtyping and inheritance, and use them effectively.
3. Implement programs:
   • Write object-oriented code to satisfy the specification of a module;
   • Express rep invariants, understand their impact on efficiency and ease of implementation, and implement them as runtime assertions;
   • Understand the fundamental notions of data abstraction, and read and write informal abstraction functions for simple datatypes;
   • Evaluate the correctness of a module by careful manual review using the specification, rep invariant and abstraction function; and
   • Develop unit and system-level test suites, and evaluate their effectiveness using simple notions of specification and code coverage.
4. Perform a small development in a team, including problem analysis, design, implementation, and testing.