A/Prof. Michael Sheng

The aims of the course are to enable students gain an insight into software engineering practices in industry and to provide students with an opportunity for:

1) understanding and obtaining the advanced software engineering theory,
2) understanding the software engineering practices in industry through industrial on-site visiting. Students will be organised to visit two software companies or software development departments within two organisations. The software engineers from the companies or organisation will be invited to give a guest lecture about the software engineering practices in industry. The links of the companies or the organisation to be visited will be put on the course website.
3) improving their capabilities in critical thinking, and analysing software engineering problems in industry via preliminary research.

Thus, the learning objectives of the course are to enable students to:

1) have a good understanding of several advanced software engineering concepts, principles and best practices applicable to software industry.
2) obtain or improve students’ skill in presenting their idea and findings to their peers by studying, researching, and reflecting on software engineering theory and practice.
3) use knowledge gained in the course to guide the software requirements engineering, analysis, design, and testing processes.
4) possess the analytical skill needed to conduct preliminary research to solve problems in the software engineering.

There is no set textbook for this course. Material will be drawn from a wide range of sources - students will be directed to resources as appropriate. Most of these resources will be put onto
the course website as either documents or as links.

1) A set of books, papers and reports has significant impact to the  software engineering domain will be recommended to students as study or reading materials. They are generally called the classical reading materials of Software Engineering. These reading materials are normally available on the internet. The course website provides some links and sources of a subset of such reading materials under the heading “Classical Software Engineering Reading List”.

2) Other recommended reading materials or resources that are available from the university library or through its portal are:

E-book: Software Engineering, Domains, Requirements, and Software Design, ISBN:978-3-540-21151-8, 978-3-540-33653-2 (Online)  

Software Engineering. Addition Wesley, 8/e, Ian Sommerville,

Electronic Resource (Conference proceedings): International Symposium on the Foundations of Software EngineeringInternational Conferences on Software EngineeringVarious SE Journal and/or Transaction articles.

The resources for the course is also presented together in an online learning environment called a Moodle. The Moodle has an area called forums. Students are expected to register on the forums created for the course. Students are required to check the news forums on a regular basis for announcements and extra learning materials relating to the course and students’ research projects.

Students are also requested to participate the learning process through the two discussion forums. The detailed information about the course and the course related material can be found on the course web site: https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/users/honours/sei/

The course will run throughout Semester 1. The timeframe for the course is shown in the table below. Starting in the first week of the semester, students will be asked to do a diagnostic assignment in which students are asked to read two recommended papers and presents their reading notes (a template is provided for writing the notes). The aim of the diagnostic assignment is to understand the level of the students’ research ability such that lecturers can measure the improvement of the students’ research ability during the course.

Guest lectures and/or industrial visiting are scheduled on Week 4 and 9 respectively. During the
industrial visit or guest lectures, students are able to talk to professional software engineers of local organisations, and get good knowledge of how the software engineering theories being applied in the industry.

In Week 3, two research lectures are given to students which include research processes,
research skill development, skill of writing research report, and skill of making a presentation. These lectures are very important to get students ready to start their research projects.

Starting from Week 3, students are requested to attend two milestone meetings with lecturers in
which students are asked to present the progress in their research projects and get advices on how to select proper papers and how to write a good research report.

From Week 7, students are required to present their research report to lecturers and the rest of students in the class. Feedback of the research reports will be given to students within two weeks and the feedback of the presentation will be given immediately after the presentation. Additionally, students are requested to initiate and engage in online discussions on Moodle. The discussion topics can be any interesting topics of software engineering such as Agile methods, Testing, Reuse, Web Engineering etc.

The information below is provided as a guide to assist students in engaging appropriately with the course requirements.

Software Engineering in Industry is a 3 unit course. The expectation is that students will be spending 10 hours per week working on the course. Students are required to attend all the lectures and students’ presentation. Students are requested to meet with the lecturer at minimum 10 minutes every fortnightly starting from Week 3. In these meetings, students have to report their progress
and consult lecturers about writing research reports. Four assignments are required to be submitted: two research reports and two industrial visiting/guest lecture reports. Students are asked to spend at minimum 46 hours on each of the two research projects; 4 hours on each of the two industrial visiting/guest lecture reports. 

NOTE: the nature of the course means that it is very easy for students to spend more than the allotted 10 hours per week at the first 8 weeks of the course, and much less hours in the later stage of the course. The onus is on students to plan their tasks and time carefully to ensure they balance their time effectively. Students should start preparing for the research project from Week 1.

The detailed activities can be accessed from the course website.

There will be two guest lectures (or onsite visits). Attendance is compulsory.

Students have the opportunity to form a small group of 3 or 4 to investigate advanced software engineering topics and present their findings.

The assessment for this subject consists of five major components with the following weightings:

(1) Two research reports: 40% (20% for each report).
(2) Two site (guest lecture) reports: 20% (10% for each report).
(3) Two presentations: 30% (15% for each presentation).
(4) Participation of the discussion forum: 5%
(5) Participation of onsite visiting and guest lectures: 5%

Attendance of milestone meetings with lecturers is compulsory and it is compulsory for students to participate in site-visits and submit the report for each visit. In order to pass the course, students need to score at least 40% for item 1 and 3 each, and combination of items 2, 4, and 5. If a student fails to achieve this, the maximum mark he or she can get will be capped at 44% (A fail grade!)

(1) Research Reports
Students are required to complete two research projects (assignments) in which students have to produce two research reports. It is expected that students spend 46 hours on each research report. Students are required to select minimum 8 papers to read on the selected topic under the guidance of the course lecturers. The format of the research report has to follow the giving instructions posted on the course website. There is a well-developed assessment rubric for research report assessment that is available on the course website.

Students are encouraged to read the rubric before they start writing their report. Students will be asked to meet lecturers (milestone meetings) twice with minimum 5 minutes duration to report their progress. Students can also consult lecturers about how to write a good research report in the milestone meetings. Lecturers will be available to students at other time when the consultation
is needed.

(2) Two Guest Lecture (Site Visit) Reports
Students are required to complete two site visiting/guest lecture reports (assignments) based on the industry visiting and the contents of guest lectures. It is expected that students spend 4
hours on each report. In the visiting report, students are required to demonstrate their capability in:

* understanding the major SE practices in the visited company explicitly and precisely,
* obtaining software engineering knowledge from the visits explicitly and thoughtfully,
* presenting their critical thinking with regard to the pros and cons of the software engineering practices in the visited companies, and presenting the comparison of the theory and practices explicitly and clearly.

The format of the visiting report has to follow the giving instructions posted on the course website. There is a well-developed assessment rubric for visiting report assessment that is available on the
course website. Lecturers will be available to students at the time when the consultation is needed.

(3) Two presentations
Students are required to give two presentations based on the research reports that they have completed. These presentations will show their understanding of the research topics and the
contents that they presented in the reports. For each student, several questions related to the contents of the presentation will be asked by lecturers and student’s peers once presentation is finished. These presentations will give students a good chance to improve their presentation skill which is essential to all engineering students.

(4) Participation of the discussion forum
Students are required to participate the online discussion forum on the selected topics guided by the course lecturer. Students are encouraged to study some software engineering theory and practices that are relevant to the course by themselves and provide findings and critical thinking to their peers through the forum. Students will be assessed based on the number of participation of
the discussion activities and the contents presented on the forum. Each student is asked to lead a discussion thread at least once and participate other discussions threads and contribute insightful discussions at least 5 times in order to get full mark for this assessment component.  

(5) Course Participation
Students are required to attend the onsite visiting/guest lecture. Students have to attend all
of the onsite visiting (guest) lecture in order to get full mark of this assessment.

All reports including research reports and visiting reports should be submitted to the assignment submission box in the foyer of School of Computer Science on Level 4 (Ingkarni Wardli Building). It shall also be submitted a soft copy to the lecturer.