Software Engineering Laboratory: Open-Source EiffelStudio

Prof. Bertrand Meyer, winter semester 2006

General info

News

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 2006, 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. You can find further information at the computer science department: see here

  Topics

• Tools to improve the build process of EiffelStudio and other software, in particular continuous or automatically scheduled build and integration of automatic tests
• EiffelVision developments, especially for Macintosh
• Automatic testing (AutoTest, mutation testing)

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. Deadline is 15 February

• 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/Wiki

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.

In addition, there's a wiki page set up at the following link:

Software Engineering Laboratory wiki page

Forum

You can use the forum to ask course-related questions. Click here to access the forum.

The forum is not maintained by us, but by the Verein der Informatik Studierenden.

There are new Mailing Lists for announcements of new EiffelStudio versions, read-only EiffelStudio mailing list which summaries daily SVN changes, developers related mailing list for EiffelStudio and users related list for EiffelStudio. More information and subscriptions here.

Downloads

• EiffelStudio Open Sourcing.
• Eiffel syntax description in BNF-E (extract from Eiffel: the language).
• Do it with style by Marcel Kessler (summary of style guidelines for Eiffel).
• Eiffel introduction

Projects

Projects Details

Assistants