August 15, 2022

CSC 253/453 Fall 2022

Collaborative Programming and Software Design

Prerequisites: CSC 172 or equivalent for CSC 253.  CSC 172 and CSC 252 or equivalent for CSC 453 and TCS 453.

Modern software is complex and more than a single person can fully comprehend. This course teaches collaborative programming which is multi-person construction of software where each person’s contribution is non-trivial and clearly defined and documented.  The material to study includes design principles, safe and modular programming in modern programming languages including Rust, software teams and development processes, design patterns, and productivity tools.  The assignments include collaborative programming and software design and development in teams.  Students in CSC 453 and TCS 453 have additional reading and requirements.

Syllabus

  • SOFTWARE DESIGN
    • Essential Difficulties
      • Complexity, conformity, changeability, invisibility. Their definitions, causes, and examples. Social and societal impacts of computing.
    • Module Design Concepts
      • Thinking like a computer and its problems. Four criteria for a module. Modularization by flowcharts vs information hiding. The module structure of a complex system. Module specification.
    • Software Design Principles
      • Multi-version software design, i.e. program families. Stepwise refinement vs. module specification. Design for prototyping and extension. USE relation.
    • Software Engineering Practice
      • Unified software development process, and its five workflows and four phases. CMM Maturity.
    • Teamwork
      • Types of teams: democratic, chief programmer, hybrids. Independence, diversity, and principles of liberty. Ethics and code of conducts.
  • PROGRAM DESIGN USING RUST
    • Safe Programming
      • Variant types and pattern matching. Slices. Mutability. Ownership, borrow, and lifetime annotations. Smart pointers.
    • Abstraction and Code Reuse
      • Iterators. Error processing. Generic types and traits. Writing tests. Modules, crates, and packages. Design patterns: iterators, builders, decorators, newtype, strategy, rail, state. Meta-programming.
    • Meta-programming (453 Only)
      • Declarative and procedural macros. Derived traits.
    • Software Tools
      • Distributed version control. Logging. Serialization.

The full course information and material are released through learn.rochester.edu.

A summary of the student evaluation for the 2021 course.

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