Course Administration

• Attendance check and introductions
• Syllabus: please read the on-line syllabus
  • It contains important details not covered in this class.

Topics for Today

• Where to find information for this course on the Web
• What is this course about?
• Where is the course syllabus?
• What is your first assignment? (See the course calendar.)
• Fast forward to use-case diagrams

What is the purpose of this course?

• Address pragmatic issues in software development
  For example:
  • Working in a team
  • Managing a project
  • Predicting cost of a project
  • What to do about an over-budget, behind-schedule project?
  • Gauging how project is progressing
  • Knowing when product is ready to deliver
  • Deciding what software to write
  • Dealing with clients/customers
  • Dealing with co-workers, bosses
  • Legal and ethical issues
  • Dealing with complexity and scale
  • Communicating ideas between participants
  • Testing and quality control
  • etc.
• These matters are generally not addressed in other CS courses
• Addressing these problems is absolutely critical
• A person who can solve them is more valuable than a skilled coder

What makes this subject different from the rest of CS?

• They generally are not solvable by purely technical means
• One cannot definitively say what is "best", so there are huge debates
• There are conflicting camps/cults, religiously held beliefs
• There are fads
• But there is a lot of accumulated knowledge, that can be useful

Things for You to Do

• Read Chapter 1 of the text, and prepare to take quiz Q1 Friday.
• Review the notes from this class, Fast Forward to Use Case Diagrams.
• Look at HW1.
• Install Eclipse and the UML tools on your computer, and play with it
• Move on to reading the section on use cases in Chapter 5, then Chapters 2 and 4. (Skip Chapter 3 for now.)

Welcome to the course! Don't hesitate to e-mail or call me if you are having problems. There is no such thing as a stupid question.