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Technical University of Munich

Software Engineering Lab

Lecturer (assistant)
Eckehard Steinbach
Markus Hofbauer
Number 0000003219
Type practical training
Duration 5 SWS
Term Wintersemester 2024/25
Language of instruction English
Position within curricula See TUMonline
Dates See TUMonline

Admission information

See TUMonline

Objectives

After participating in the lab, the students are able to understand the structure and management of collaborative software projects. Further the students are able to apply the concepts of unit testing for the validation of their own implementations on every layer.

Description

Software engineering skills of any engineer become more important with the ongoing digitization and automation. Software engineering means not only delivering an implementation that fulfills the requirements and generates correct results. A second highly important aspect is to deliver software that can be maintained by multiple contributors, over months, years or even decades. This lifetime aspect and the number of developers contributing to the software introduces additional requirements and challenges in the development process. Software has to be testable, readable, and extendable. Concepts such as unit tests, code reviews, and continuous integration support writing software with these characteristics.

Prerequisites

Basic programming knowledge

Teaching and learning methods

On a biweekly basis, the students will learn new concepts of software engineering and manifest the concepts by applying them in practical exercises and homeworks. All homeworks are intended to improve/refactor/extend the given codebase. The students will learn to solve common problems of maintaining high sustainable and resilient software over time.
In total, there will be 5-hour lab sessions per week where the new concepts are presented and a supervisor helps the students to get started, provides links to the relevant literature, and gives feedback and advice on the implementation.

Examination

The examination consists of the following components, which will also build the final grade:

● Biweekly programming homeworks (5 x 10%)
● Final exam (50%)

The biweekly homeworks are as means to measure the students’ ability to understand the presented concept, and to apply the concept in practical examples.
In the written examination, students demonstrate their theoretical knowledge of modern software engineering techniques by answering questions, reviewing code, and writing pseudo code under time pressure and without helping material. This includes a basic understanding of build systems, unit testing, test driven development, software development tools, and software refactoring techniques.

Recommended literature

[1] Winters, Titus, Hyrum Wright, and Tom Manshreck. "Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming over Time." (2020).

Links

Guest Speakers

We are very grateful to all guest speakers who took the time to prepare and give a talk in this course. The following table lists all guest speakers and their talks.
Speaker Date Topic
Kent Beck December 4, 2024 About the cost of change
Phil Nash June 5, 2024 Testing Fundamentals
Robert C. Martin ("Uncle Bob") December 12, 2023 Basic Test Driven Development
Klaus Iglberger January 9, 2023 What is C++? - A Historical Perspective
Titus Winters June 13, 2022 Software Engineering - Principles aka SWE Book Theses
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