Purpose: This module is intended to help bridge the gap between university teaching and industrial software engineering practice. We do this by exploring a different topic each week, doing some of our own research and practical work, and inviting expert guest speakers to join us and share their knowledge and experience.
Class time in person on Mondays 9am to 11am in Huxley 145.
Office hours usually on Wednesdays 09:30 to 12:00 in Huxley 226 or via Teams, the booking sheet is here. During some weeks, office hours will have to be totally remote and during some weeks they may change day from Wednesday (probably to Thursday). Read the spreadsheet carefully to make sure you understand which day you are signing up for and whether it is face-to-face or via video.
Coursework can be found on Scientia here.
The official outline of the course can be found here. This web page aims to provide more specific information for the Autumn 2023 run of the module.
The module is mainly self-directed learning, with group work to complete each week before a lecture session on the topic, when in some weeks we feature guest speakers where they will give a talk or particpate in a panel, and we will look at some of the work you have done in your groups and discuss it.
For each topic we will provide some suggested reading to start the research process but you are encouraged to find and critically consider other related material on the subject.
We cannot stress enough how important your contribution is to this module, both via coursework and in class.
You will probably find that this module is quite a lot of work during the term, however there is no final exam and so you are free of work for this module by Monday 4th December 2023, a full week before your exams start.
Most weeks you should expect to spend about 6 hours working in your group on research and practical exercises from the worksheet and then 2 hours in the lecture session, meaning a weekly workload of about 8 hours. We do not expect people to spend more than 8 hours per week on the module.
Hopefully you will also find the module stimulating, quite fun and a little different to many of your regular taught modules.
Schedule
| Week Starting | Topic | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| 9th October 2023 | Cloud Economics | Robert Chatley, Eoin Woods |
| 16th October 2023 | Microservices | Sarah Wells |
| 23rd October 2023 | Effective Microservices | Panel: Nick Rozanski, Murat Erder, Eoin Woods |
| 30th October 2023 | Presentation Week | |
| 6th November 2023 | DevOps | Alex Cross |
| 13th November 2023 | Software Engineering Leadership | Panel: Pete Hamilton and Andrew Eland |
| 20th November 2023 | Sustainable Software | Ben Logan |
| 27th November 2023 | Modern Software Engineering | Robert Chatley, Eoin Woods |
| 4th December 2023 | Final reports due |
Weekly Schedule
All of the topic weeks follow the same schedule:
- The week before the topic lecture you organise yourselves into groups of three and complete the worksheet for that topic, available from the coursework system.
- Submit your work by 19:00 on the Friday before of the topic week (e.g. Friday 6th October for Cloud Economics).
- We have a lecture session from 9am - 11am on Monday morning. The lecture will be:
- A short introduction from the course leader introducing the topic and the format of the session.
- A talk of 20-30 minutes from our guest(s) or the course leaders.
- Short 10 minute presentations of your work from your groups, followed by discussion with the guest expert(s) or course leaders and the class. We will normally have time for about 3 groups’ work to be presented and discussed. We will rotate the groups to present.
- Summary of what we have learned and reminder of the topic for next week.
- On Wednesday morning from 9:30am - 12:30pm we have an “office hours” session where you can sign up for 20 minute blocks of time to discuss any aspect of the course or your work with the course leaders.
Assessment
There is no exam for this module and all assessment is completed by Monday 4th December 2023.
The assessment is continual and is made up of the following elements:
- Your weekly group work from the exercise sheets - 20%
- Mid-point assessment which is a group presentation - 30%
- Final assessment which is a group written report - 50%