Software Engineering Laboratory: Open-Source EiffelStudio

Prof. Bertrand Meyer, Spring Semester 2009


General info: News | Course description | Topics | Exam | Course books | Mailing List |Assistants


General info

News

23.2.2009 The preliminary meeting, in which the available projects will be presented, will take place on Monday March 2nd at 16:00, IFW E42.
Marco P
23.2.2009 The web page has been created.
Marco P

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 scheduled for Monday March 2nd at 16:00, IFW E42. You can also have a look at the projects page. Another option is to directly contact one of the assistants.

Exam

The general theme set is to add to EiffelStudio an open-source contribution that is good enough to be included in the standard delivery, or otherwise represents a significant step forward. EiffelStudio is taken in a broad sense, including supporting tools and libraries. Any addition must be:
  • 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. Deadline is May 31st
For grading we will take into account all the previous elements, in particular:
  • 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

Assistant

Office

Phone
Benjamin Morandi RZ J 9 01 632 78 28
Marco Piccioni RZ J 9 01 632 65 32
Marco Trudel RZ J 9 01 632 85 92
Stefan van Staden RZ J 5 01 632 77 04
Jason Yi Wei RZ J 5 01 632 69 57