A First Course in Software Engineering

The course adopted design principles from other engineering disciplines to software engineering to strengthen reuse. The course also includes an evolutionary approach to assignments and teaching and emphasizes the construction of software rather than the writing of code. In addition the course should: teach language concepts and provide a context to the above material with a brief overview of computer science history, and a brief overview of ``machines'' (as appropriate).

At the end of the course students should be able to design and construct a solution given

• a problem
• a set of components (design, code, documentation, test cases, etc.,) that could be used

Thus the material for course one includes introductions to:

• Understanding a specification, building from sample specifications (with reuse) and building toward specifications (to reuse).

• Problem solving by assembling components for customizing and analyzing good examples of design by reasoning by analogy, trial and error with learning, etc.

• Standard set of views of: Specification; Representation; Documentation; Style; Assessment; (Peer) Code review; Testing; Qualification; Analyzing.

• Customizing (tailoring), retrieving from (domain specific) ``library'', and building generic code.