The Software Design Laboratory

Software Design Laboratory is an undergraduate practicum in software design, which focuses on principles and practices of large-scale software design. Concepts and examples borrowed from elsewhere in Computer Science are applied to the construction of a significant project, namely a command interpreter resembling the Bourne shell. The course focus is on long-lived software systems of a size requiring group effort. We therefore address maintenance, testing, documentation, code readability, version control, and group dynamics

The Software Design Laboratory

Software Design Laboratory is an undergraduate practicum in software design, which focuses on principles and practices of large-scale software design. Concepts and examples borrowed from elsewhere in Computer Science are applied to the construction of a significant project, namely a command interpreter resembling the Bourne shell. The course focus is on long-lived software systems of a size requiring group effort. We therefore address maintenance, testing, documentation, code readability, version control, and group dynamics. 1. INTRODUCTION There is a transition in every Computer Science curriculum between introductory courses which are suitable for non-majors and more advanced courses. The former typically introduce one or more programming languages (often Pascal, but sometimes Lisp, Scheme, or some other language), touch upon basic data structures (e.g., trees and queues), and introduce fundamental algorithms (e.g., sorting and searching). The assignments are small: they either demo..