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Software Engineering class is really really annoying...

J

jinduy

Diamond Member
i'm up late doing this 40 page document with graphs and such and i'm feeling like this is such a waste of time because the teacher has assigned 5 of these to us so far this quarter and it's starting to feel like overkill....this class is so boring and there is no programming...

any of you CS majors ever taken these kinda classes and dreaded/loved it?
 
Originally posted by: jinduy
this class is so boring and there is no programming...
Click to expand...

Better get used to it, because any job involving a competently-managed software project is going to be one big software engineering class for the rest of your career. I don't have statistics, but I'm going to hazard a guess and say that the majority of software projects don't fail because of programming incompetency, but due to poor management.

And yes, I thought it was the suckiest of the sucky-sucks while I was in college.
 
Software engineering is good!

I realised that only after my industrial attachment with in a software developing company.
 
I took a software engineering course in college and loved it. But maybe that was due to the way mine was taught.

The way the class was taught was the following:
Prof split everyone into 3 person groups based on a questionaire and a formula of her design from the results.
Each group came up with a basic plan of a project to be approved by the prof.
Then each group had to come up with detailed designs for their plan and present to the rest of the class.
Then you "hire" other students in the class to work on your project while you get "hired" by other project teams to work on theirs. You can hire people to do coding, QA work, tech docs, etc... You then "pay" the person with a rating that is used for their grade.
End of the semester, present a hopefully working project to the class. Out of about 11 groups, only one didn't have a working product. The one I helped design tied for 1st place in the class.

Except for the lack of a maintainence phase (class was only one semester long) it did a good job of showing you what really happens with projects. Well, except for the inevitable cancelation 75% of the way through one and then being transfered to something else.
 
Originally posted by: nord1899
I took a software engineering course in college and loved it. But maybe that was due to the way mine was taught.

The way the class was taught was the following:
Prof split everyone into 3 person groups based on a questionaire and a formula of her design from the results.
Each group came up with a basic plan of a project to be approved by the prof.
Then each group had to come up with detailed designs for their plan and present to the rest of the class.
Then you "hire" other students in the class to work on your project while you get "hired" by other project teams to work on theirs. You can hire people to do coding, QA work, tech docs, etc... You then "pay" the person with a rating that is used for their grade.
End of the semester, present a hopefully working project to the class. Out of about 11 groups, only one didn't have a working product. The one I helped design tied for 1st place in the class.

Except for the lack of a maintainence phase (class was only one semester long) it did a good job of showing you what really happens with projects. Well, except for the inevitable cancelation 75% of the way through one and then being transfered to something else.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a great idea. I always wanted to take a class like that.
 
Originally posted by: XZeroII
Originally posted by: nord1899
I took a software engineering course in college and loved it. But maybe that was due to the way mine was taught.

The way the class was taught was the following:
Prof split everyone into 3 person groups based on a questionaire and a formula of her design from the results.
Each group came up with a basic plan of a project to be approved by the prof.
Then each group had to come up with detailed designs for their plan and present to the rest of the class.
Then you "hire" other students in the class to work on your project while you get "hired" by other project teams to work on theirs. You can hire people to do coding, QA work, tech docs, etc... You then "pay" the person with a rating that is used for their grade.
End of the semester, present a hopefully working project to the class. Out of about 11 groups, only one didn't have a working product. The one I helped design tied for 1st place in the class.

Except for the lack of a maintainence phase (class was only one semester long) it did a good job of showing you what really happens with projects. Well, except for the inevitable cancelation 75% of the way through one and then being transfered to something else.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a great idea. I always wanted to take a class like that.
Click to expand...

It was a great class. Didn't hurt that it was taught by one of my favorite prof's at college. She has since left under early retirement due to budget cuts from the state (25+% over 2 years).
 
The papers I wrote in my Electrical Engineering classes were nothing compared to the amount of specs and general BS ISO documents I have to write now.

ISO is killer of trees.
 
Ahh the memories of sleepness nights.

My undergrad S/E course was a relative disaster, taughy by a visiting prof with a German accent. Our group made the costly mistake of not sticking with the provided problem (a battleship game, whoop-de-do) and instead embarked on building an ambitious distributed MP3 Jukebox (think MusicMatch, but fully networked and built around a relational database). I don't think the professor understood the complexity of the work. And he almost certainly held a grudge against us because of the copyright implications of MP3 music, even though we implemented access control on *every* track as he wanted.

At the end, amazingly, what we cobbled together actually worked, but it was by no means a good example of software engineering and not a project I'd care to publicly release. Overall still a good learning experience; I was introduced to OO modeling and both Design Patterns and Code Complete.

I aced the only exam (no midterms, just a two-part final), but in the final analysis, the visiting prof dicked me by weighing the project much more than is appropriate.
 
My Software Engineering class was excellent...
I learned that out of the entire software creation process, only 15% of it is devoted to actual coding..
The rest is the economical planning, working with customer, alfa and beta testing etc, etc
Also, my teacher was is excellent, guy who works as a big fish in IT departament of the Ford Motor Company...
Everything he said was build on the "real life example"....
Great class
 
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