Software Engineering Laboratory: Open-Source EiffelStudio

Prof. Bertrand Meyer, Autumn Semester 2009

General info

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Course description

Software Engineering Laboratory: Open-Source EiffelStudio, 252-2601-00

The growing popularity of open-source projects provides a fertile ground for creative software developers to demonstrate and hone their design and implementation skills. This course is an opportunity to take part in leading-edge software construction and gain academic credit for it. The EiffelStudio environment (in 2008, 2 million lines of open-source code) provides a rich basis of potential extensions and new developments. The course is not structured as a traditional set of lectures but is laboratory-style:
students choose a project and meet regularly with assistants to report progress and obtain guidance. The results produced should meet standards of quality software engineering; the best developments are candidate for inclusion in actual software releases. This is an opportunity to learn by doing and to encounter the challenges of large, production-grade software development.

There will not be formal lectures. The course will be entirely based on students' personal work.

  Topics

Many topics are proposed, each possibly supporting several projects.
For a list of available topics please attend the first meeting that will be announced on this page. You can also have a look at the projects page. Another option is to directly contact one of the assistants.

Exam

• An improvement to EiffelStudio
• Fit naturally within EiffelStudio
• Be compatible with the Eiffel method
• Written in impeccable style
• Reliable (extensively contracted, extensively tested, no known breaking bugs)
• Well designed and well documented
• Available as open source
• Done by a group of at most two people, unless otherwise approved
• Ready on time.

• Design and code quality
• Documentation
• Usefulness
• Maturity
• Ability to be integrated in EiffelStudio or other product
• Scope
• Ambition
• Role of various project members

Course books

• Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Software Construction, Second Edition, Prentice Hall, 1997 ISBN 0-13-629155-4

Other (recommended) books:

• Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides: Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Addison-Wesley, 1995, ISBN 0201634988
• Karine Arnout: From Patterns to Components, Ph.D. thesis, 2004. (See publications)

Mailing List

A specific mailing list, called soft-engine-lab, has been created and all the students that participate to the projects have been subscribed to it.

Assistants