Big Ideas in �Software Engineering

Fall 2024

Announcements

1. Today at 5:00PM: Welcome Back Gathering (Sponsored by the CS+Math Departments)
2. Readings for Tuesday are posted: Version Control. Please come Tuesday prepared to discuss.

Outline

• Discussion of the Readings
• Lab 1

Discussion of Readings

Preface | Ch 1. What is Software Engineering? | Ch 16. Version Control

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What struck you in the reading? Your thoughts here…

How is Software Engineering different from Programming?

• SWE considers time – long term, continual, over time, onforseeable future. You have to think about more stuff.
• The management side of computer science
• Cost
• Scale!
• Accessibilitity (internationalization)
• Who is the user
• Techies, average joe
• Speaking across the divide

Is Software Engineering actually Engineering?

• Yes:
• Both are solving problems
• How is it different:
• Physical materials (tangible issues)
• We can think outside the box
• Less likely to kill people
• Test it before someone uses it
• ​

Why Not Just Aim for "Nothing Changes"?

• It’s impossible:
• Consumer needs change
• OS upgrades, language you’re writing in, new innovations
• The “one thing better” problem
• Technological revolution – your thing isn’t working on the same degree.
• Ability to take advantage of efficiency gains
• ​

What is Hyrum’s Law?

Why doesn’t “We’ll delete the old widget on August 15th; make sure you’ve converted to the new widget” work?

How should decisions be made?

What do we mean by trade-offs?

• Opportunity costs: we could spend two weeks on this, but that means we can’t do this other thing.

Today’s Lab

• Code Editors
• VS Code
• SSH integration
• Auto-Formatters
• The Command Line + Linux
• Why Linux? Why Vim / Emacs?
• OS Environment Configuration (.zshrc file)
• Where is your home directory
• What does “sourcing” something do?