Software Engineering Project

Cloud software and scalable distributed systems are commonly used to develop reliable and scalable systems. Within the software engineering project students will learn to build a reliable, high-quality, and scalable system using distributed computing. According to ANSI, Software Reliability is defined as: the probability of failure-free software operation for a specified duration in a specified environment. Reliability of systems involves a number of concepts:

• Availability
  Redundancy, failover, degraded performance, intermittent connectivity and eventual consistency, fault tolerance, ETBF, error recovery.
• Maintainability
  Code quality, coding standards, automated quality tools, metrics, documentation.
• Testability
  Test-based development, remote testing, automated (GUI) testing, link between test, requirement, issue and resolution (jira).
• Specification
  Modelling of behaviour.
• Logging and monitoring, backup and restore
  Identifying and logging key process parameters, performance measurements, error propagation.
• Development process quality
  Code quality tools, review process (Gitflow), versioning, continuous and concurrent development, continuous delivery.
• Security
• 3rd party software
  Defensive programming, product evaluation, software maturity (cots!), future-proof software, obsolescence, licensing.

Several of these concepts are introduced and practiced within this module which will help students to bring their software engineering skills to the master level. The theory is introduced and practiced in workshops. This knowledge is then applied in a single project in which the students work together to develop a professional high-quality distributed system.

The theory is combined in workshops focussing on three areas:

• Reliable systems: How can methods and tools be applied to the software engineering process to ensure quality of the end product.
• Parallel and distributed systems: How are modern distributed and parallel systems developed and how can practical systems be designed using industry accepted design patterns.
• Advanced programming: modern programming languages combined functional and generic programming with object-oriented programming. In this course students will learn how functional and generic programming can be effectively used.