Brooks, Mythical Man Month, 25th Anniversary Edition and about 20-25 papers.

Brooks, Mythical Man Month, 25th Anniversary Edition and about 20-25 papers.

In every scientific and engineering discipline there needs to be a balance between theoretical and experimental pursuits. Theories must be subjected to rigorous empirical validations. The goal of this course is to provide a deep understanding of the principles of empirical studies relevant to software specifically and computing generally.

The emphasis will be twofold: first, gaining an understanding of the problems and pitfalls, intent and goals of experimental work in our field; and second, evaluating and understanding of the current state of the art in software related empirical studies by looking at and discussing empirical papers as found in the primary journals and conference proceedings.

We will look at different kinds of empirical evaluation techniques and designs from related fields such as behavioral sciences and see how we can adapt those techniques to our use. The text we will use is Rosenthal and Rosnow, Essentials of Behavioral Research: Methods and Data Analysis. Second edition. McGraw Hill (Series in Psychology) 1981, 1994.

This graduate depth course in software engineering will focus on the problem of modeling and representing architectural and design intent in planned and agile developments. Architecture and design decisions are the mechanisms by which requirements are transformed from what a system is supposed to do into how it is to do it. Critical to both the initial development and the evolution of a system is a shared understanding of the intent of those decisions . ie, not just what the decisions are, but also the rationale or why for those decisions. This course will begin with a look at historical context and then continue with current research for capturing architecture/design decisions and intent, including topics such as: capturing rationale in architectures, architectural styles and other idioms; capturing and using intent in agile contexts; using intent to manage changing requirements and designs; using intent to understand and manage evolution; and using intent modeling to evaluate satisfaction of intent for static and self-adaptive systems. The course is organized as a series of lectures, research paper presentations and discussions.