Module Identifier
CS12420
Module Title
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Academic Year
2008/2009
Co-ordinator
Mr Christopher W Loftus
Semester
Semester 2
Pre-Requisite
CS12230 or CS12320
Other Staff
 

Course Delivery

Delivery Type Delivery length / details
Lecture Up to 30 lectures
Other Workshop. Up to 11 x 1hr
 

Assessment

Assessment Type Assessment length / details Proportion
Semester Assessment Course Work:  20%
Semester Assessment Group Project:  20%
Semester Assessment A2  In-Course Assessment: Best of 2 in-class tests  20%
Semester Exam 1.5 Hours   Online examination  40%
Supplementary Exam 1.5 Hours   Online examination 

Learning Outcomes

The module concentrates on developing the student's professional approach to software development.

The major learning outcome of this module is that students should:
1. have an appreciation of the Java concepts covered in the syllabus and be able to make full use of them in their programs.

In addition, on successful completion of the module, students should:
2. appreciate the importance of software design, coding and testing as demonstrated by their own software development;
3. be able to analyse a problem and produce high quality software designs as shown by their project work;
4. be able to produce more robust programs making full use of Java exceptions;
5. be able to make data persist from one program run to another;
6. demonstrate how classes can be made more reusable using Java interfaces;
7. produce high quality software that is robust, reliable, reusable and maintainable.
8. have practical experience of using Swing to develop user-friendly front ends;
9. have more experience of software development within a team working to tight time constraints.

Aims

This module builds on the material covered in CS12230/CS12320 to further the development of participants' programming skills.

Students are introduced to more advanced facilities that are available to the software engineer to improve the robustness, reusability and maintainability of software. In particular the module involves detailed coverage of exceptions and an introduction to interfaces.

The graphical user interface, Swing, is used as the basis for implementing user-friendly front-ends. Although the coverage is not exhaustive, students will gain plenty of practical experience the use of these concepts.

The Java programming language is used as a basis for illustrating the concepts covered by the syllabus, but where possible the concepts are introduced in a language independent manner.


Content

1. Robust Programming - 4 Lectures
The need for a separate mechanism for handling erroneous code; throwing and catching exceptions. User defined exceptions.

2. Persistent Data - 2 Lectures
Advanced input/output and files. Worked example bringing together file handling and exceptions.

3. An introduction to Graphical User Interfaces - 9 Lectures
Building on programming skills, this looks at developing graphical front ends to simple software systems introducing Java's AWT and Swing classes.

4. Abstract Data Types and Linear Data Structures - 7 Lectures
More on the ideas of abstraction and encapsulation. Java support for their implementation. An introduction to linear data structures: Stacks and Queues implemented.

5. Enhancing the Reusability of Classes - 5 Lectures
An introduction to Java interfaces: Sortable, Listable and the standard Iterator class. Using interfaces to produce a reusable List class. Generics.

6. Threads - 3 lectures
An introduction to concurrency, Java threads, threads in Swing, the event dispatch thread. Synchronisation.

Reading List

Recommended Text
Sierra, Kathy. (2005.) Head first Java /Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates. This is very accessible. However, any Java 5/6 book that you are comfortable with will be fine. 2nd ed. O'Reilly Primo search Reference Text
Freeman, Eric (2004.) Head First design patterns /Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman ; with Kathy Sierra and Burt Bates. Also used extensively in CS21120 in the second year, O'Reilly Primo search Recommended Background
Stevens, Perdita (Dec. 2005) Using UML:Software Engineering with Objects and Components 2nd ed.,Revised Addison-Wesley Longman [Imprint] Primo search

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 4