Final Blog

On Friday we took the third and final test, I ended up getting to class a little late due to having an interview immediately before class, but over all I don't think losing those couple of minutes affected me significantly. I thought the test was structured pretty well however I was rather surprised that there wasn't any python on the test at all. After having almost all python for the last two tests the sudden change was rather surprising, though considering we covered the refactoring example almost exclusively in Java it makes sense in hindsight. The one thing about the test I thought should've been changed was the UML questions. I feel that having two questions devoted to that portion of material was overkill.

Over all I enjoyed CS373 and felt that it was beneficial to me. Of course due to my prior experience with OOP I probably had a better idea of what to expect going into this class than others who had never taken a class with Professor Downing before. One of the most positive things about this class was simply the way in which lectures were conducted on a day to day basis. I know I've talked about this in previous blogs (particularly the early ones) but I really do feel that Professor Downing has a really unique way of lecturing, which not only brings a level of participation from students that I haven't seen in other classes but helps you remember things from lecture better. I honestly wish that all the other classes (where applicable) at UT were taught in a similar manner.

On the other hand I felt that readings were a mixed bag when it came to this class. While I did enjoy the Extreme Programming book since it was nice to see a formalized version of the agile concepts that I was exposed to over the summer I felt like the Refactoring textbook was just too difficult to get through (particularly in the early chapters where it felt like Fowler was just pointing out common sense things). This combined with the fact that we went over the refactoring examples in class for an extended period of time and weren't really quizzed over the reading kind of drained me of any motivation to read the material on my own. As for the extra readings, these were hit or miss in my opinion. While I enjoyed some and felt like they were definitely worthwhile (ex. Guerrilla Interview) there were others that I felt were a waste of time (ex. Gender Differences).

If there was one thing I would change about SWE it would be to remove the Haskell portion of the class, I just don't think it was really that useful in the long run, especially since we hardly covered it in the last third of the class and weren't even tested over it in the end. Over all hwoever I do think this class was beneficial to me, and will probably be one of the more useful ones to me once I graduate. I would definitely recommend this class to my friends.

Week #14 (11/21 - 11/25)

With class being cancelled on Wednesday and Friday there really isn't much to talk about. We got to the initial presentations on Monday and I felt that both teams did well, though the second group shot themselves in the foot with, what I assume was, slow internet due to them running out of bandwidth. Out of the two groups I think the best feature was the Team Xtreme's recommended results on misspelled searches (honestly, that's going to be tough to beat).

I'm looking forward to the rest of the presentations this week, however the final test has me feeling a bit apprehensive. I haven't really thought about it yet, but I really need to try and find a better way to study for it given my poor performance on test #2. Unfortunately it looks like all of my professors are trying to cram stuff in this week (as is the norm, sadly) so we'll see how much time I can devote to studying before Thursday night.

Week #13 (11/14 - 11/18)

So we wrapped up the final project with a wimper rather than a bang. This phase of the assignment really felt much more laid back than previous iterations to the point that instead of working on code the night before it was due, we were simply wrapping up documentation and the ilk. Looking ahead we only have the presentation left, though my group doesn't present till the last day before exam #3.

In class this week we spent time covering both singletons and reflection. Over all the material continued the trend of being interesting though I'm not sure exactly how they relate to the topic of "Software Engineering". After the lecture on Friday me and some of my classmates reflected on the fact that we had just finished the last lecture we would ever have from Prof. Downing since we will all be graduating in the spring. Looking back, I am glad that I took both this class and OOP since the concepts/topics covered were both interesting and useful, but I can't say I'll miss some of these projects.

Tomorrow is the first day of presentations, I'm interested to see how each group attempted to differentiate their creation from other groups.

Week #11 (11/7 - 11/11)

So Phase three of WC has been going a lot smoother than the previous phases in my opinion. Part of the reason for this is that for a lot of the features we've been able to find libraries that already exist and simply plug them in with minimal code. This has really sped up the process and has also allowed us to distribute and parallelize the work across the team. Over all I would say that this is definitely the least stressful out of all the WC phases.

Part of the reason that this phase is more enjoyable than other phases is the fact that it's pretty open ended. The only real requirement we had was to implement search, while everything else was left at the discretion of the team. It's nice to have that type flexibility in a cs porject since usually you're working off a specific spec provided by the instructor. In fact I think this is the first time at UT that I've had a CS programming assignment that was this open-ended.

Week #11 (10/31 - 11/04)

This past week we turned in phase 2 of World Crisis. Over all I think the process went off without any hitches. We managed to break up the work evenly enough but at the same time kept each individual subgroup informed of the over all progress of the group that when we put all the major parts together there weren't any serious problems. The third phase seems to be a lot more open ended than the previous phases, so I'm not too sure how my group will do.

We've spent a lot of time in class covering the stuff from the Refactoring textbook. While I was looking forward tot his part of the class so far the examples we've covered have felt pretty straight forward to me with almost no surprises. Hopefully we'll cover some unique solutions soon, because otherwise I'm not really sure what the point is of having an in depth discussion on the topic is. I'm also wondering how exactly we'll be tested over this material.

Week #10 (10/24 - 10/28)

This week feature more examination on the differences between the Java, Python, and Haskell programming languages. While I've been enjoying the material so far I finally realized that we only have about 5 weeks of school left and up to this point this class really hasn't been about Software Engineering. The name really doesn't aptly relate what is exactly covered in the class in my opinion.

On the project side phase 2 of World Crises is of course taking longer. Honestly I felt like converting the import/export functionality to take advantage of the datastore would have been an easy conversion, but it's definitely taken some hours to get that working, and we haven't even gotten around to the merge import yet. Overall however I think we're making good progress on this part of the project and we should finish with a decent amount of time to spare.

Week #9 (10/17 - 10/21)

Not really much to talk about this week since we took the test on Friday. Definitely don't think I did that well on the test, I felt like I got bogged down a bit on the first couple of problems which impact how much time I could spend on the later part of the exam. So yea, definitely walked out of that one with a bad feeling. Hopefully I didn't do too horribly and can bounce back on the next one.

I felt like the first part of the world crisis project wasn't too challenging with most of the hurdles having more to do with logistic (i.e. getting organized/coordinating with a big group) than actual project problems. Looking ahead I expect that to change big time. This upcoming week is also the first time we'll have reading assigned out of the Refactoring text book, hopefully it won't be too bad.