This course introduces students to the tools and techniques for developing software systems of a size and quality of an industrially relevant nature. The course teaches the fundamental strategies of abstraction, decomposition and reuse as methods for constructing such systems. Verification and validation techniques, with an emphasis on testing, are taught as a means to ensure that students are able to deliver software products of the quality required. It also introduces students to the principles and practices of software engineering.

In particular, the course will cover: recursive data structures and algorithms; structured data types, abstract data types and their applications; object-oriented programming; and software life-cycle. The course will also introduce some of the theoretical fundamentals that underpins software engineering, including: reasoning about software and its application to specifications, and verification and validation.

Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:

• Given a specification of the required behavior of a simple program the student should be able to: design, implement, and test a solution.


• Analyze alternatives among simple data-structures -- lists, tables, and trees, for example -- and select the most appropriate structure for a simple task.


• Analyze alternatives among simple algorithms -- sorting and searching, for example -- and select the most appropriate for a simple task. 


• Rigorously analyze the correctness of a simple program fragment given a logical description of its required behaviour. 


• Apply their knowledge of regular expressions to devise a regular expressions to match target phrases. 


• Apply their knowledge of testing principles to select appropriate test data for an individual software routine.


• Identify economic implications of the software life cycle to the process of software construction. 


• Identify the invariant of a simple loop. 


• Apply the technique of recursion to implement simple requirements.


• Understand some of the complexities of multi-threading.

Assignment (30%); Lab Tests (20%); Final Exam (50%)

Thirty one-hour lectures, nine two-hour tutorial/laboratory sessions and three two-hour seminars.

Enrolment in BSEng; COMP1100

COMP1110 and COMP2750

Horstmann, Cay Big Java , Wiley, 4rd Edition, 2010