Harvey Mudd College
Computer Science

CS121: Software Development

Spring 2011

Lecture:

M&W 2:45-4:00, Sprague Learning Studio

Professors:

Z Sweedyk, 1249 Olin, x78360

Mail: z@cs.hmc.edu

Office hours: TBD

Mike Erlinger, 1258A Olin, x18912

Mail: mike@cs.hmc.edu

Office hours: TBD

Course mailing list:

cs-121-l@hmc.edu

Course trac:

Team Human Geography 1 (KL,CL)

Team Human Geography 2 (CL, KG)

Team Migration (KG, EM)

Team Economics (EM, AN)

Team Government (AN, KL)

Alpha Releases:

Team Human Geography 1

Team Human Geography 2 (CL, KG)

Team Migration (KG, EM)

Team Economics (EM, AN)

Team Government (AN, KL)

Beta Releases:

Team Human Geography 1

Team Human Geography 2 (CL, KG)

Team Migration (KG, EM)

Team Economics (EM, AN)

Team Government (AN, KL)

Tutors/Graders:

Karen Gragg

Becky Green

Kathryn Lingel

Calvin Loncaric

Eric Mullen

Adam Novak

What This Course Is About

The objective of this course is to introduce you to the theory and practice of software design and development. You will study the stages of development from requirements specification and analysis through design, implementation, and testing. You will study ways to organize and manage these stages. You will also learn principles of software design including design patterns and anti-patterns. You will apply these principles and techniques in the design and development of an educational computer game.

We focus on games for several reasons. Games are fun projects and most students have a strong sense of what constitutes a good product. More importantly, games require solutions to a broad range of problems that rarely show up in a single software project. Games are real-time systems with stringent performance constraints. They require good user interface design. They typically use computer graphics and sound. Games can draw on other areas of computer science as well, such as artificial intelligence, computer networking, and computer art. And they often involve the modeling and simulation of physical systems, which requires concepts from mathematics, engineering, and physics.

You will work in a team to build an educational game for students at Hillside Middle School in Kalamazoo, MI. You will interact with three teachers at Hillside, Heidi Ellis, Greg Orr, and Josh Yavor, as well as several classrooms of 6th and 7th grade social science students. Artifacts you produce will be critiqued by Hillside students on a bi-weekly basis. The game you develop will be further polished over the summer by HMC research students and eventually released for use by social science teachers across the country.

Customer contact:

Heidi Ellis

Greg Orr

Josh Yavor

Muddy Hills Blog

Grades

Your grade will depend on your semester-long design/development project as well as a midterm exam, quizzes, and class participation:

Game project	75%
Midterm exam	10%
Daily quizzes	10%
Class participation	5%

Textbooks

Code Complete by McConnell
Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design by McLaughlin, Pollice, and West

Schedule

Date	Topic	Readings due	Assignment due	Links	Hillside Activity
Tues 1/18	Introduction			Project: Phase I Intro Questinnaire
Thurs 1/20	Requirements	MC 3.1-3.4,20.1 Wiegers: Requirement Traps Ambler: BRUF		trac set up
Tues 1/25	Requirements modeling	Wiegers: Listening to Customer's Voices Cockburn:Use Cases, 10 years later Bittner: Use cases, storyboards, and prototypes Gabler: How to Prototype a Game in under 7 days	Competitive Analysis High Concept Game Box prototype trac set up <	PacMan use cases UMLet: UML tool
Thurs 1/27	Customer Elicitation		Customer Elicitation prep
Tues 2/1	Design practice	McConnell 5.1-5.2,5.4-5.5,20.2, 21 UML Tutorial	Customer Elicitation Report Game Use Cases Technology Assessment Risk Analysis	UMLet: UML tool	Game box critique
Thurs 2/3	Design principles I	McConnell 5.2-5.3 McLaughlin 4
Tues 2/8	Proposal review		Prototype Proposal	Project: Phase II
Thurs 2/10	Design principles II	Kampe: Postmortems McLaughlin pp 197-232 McConnell 6	Proposal rewrite (optional) Postmortem	Phase 1 feedback
Tues 2/15	Design patterns Architecture Review	McLauglin Ch 5 part 2, Ch 6, Ch 7	Archiectural Design Draft		Risk analysis
Thurs 2/17	UI	usability.net: User Centered Design Bay: Designing games that don't suck Glinert: Upping your games usability
Tues 2/22	Arch. Des. Review prep	McConnell 19.6, 22 McLaughlin Ch 8,9 wikipedia:software testing Kampe: S/W testing Thompson: Halo3 testing	Architectural Design Review Package Initial UI Design Prototype
Thurs 2/24	Architectural Design Review
Tues 3/1	UI Test		UI Test Package Prototype		UI Critique
Thurs 3/3	Testing
Tues 3/8	Test plan review		Revised architecture Revised UI design Test plan review package Prototype
Thurs 3/10	Midterm Exam
Tues 3/15	Spring break
Thurs 3/17	Spring break
Tues 3-22	Project Management I		Prototype Revised test plan Test report
Thurs 3-24	Project Management II
Tues 3-29	Class Presentations		Alpha Release Test report	Project: Phase III	Alpha test
Thurs 3-31	Game evaluations
Tues 4-5	Code standards 1	McConnell Ch 7, 8	Management Plan Test report
Thurs 4-7	Code standards 2	McConnel Ch 10, 11	Naming checklist
Tues 4-12	Code standards 3	McConnell Ch 24, 31	Management Update Test Report		Learning objectives
Thurs 4-14	Game testing
Tues 4-19	Game balancing		Management Update Test Report Beta analysis
Thurs 4-21	Game fun
Tues 4-26	Final report review		Final report draft (due Sunday 4/24 11:59PM) Final report draft comments Final Mgt. Update Test Report		User Tests
Thurs 4-28	Student presentation critique		Presentation draft
Presentations Week	Final presentation/demo
Fri 5-13 (2:00 PM, exam time)	No meeting		Final project submission
Week of June 3	HMC visits Hillside				User Tests conducted by HMC summer researchers