CPSC 310: Introduction to Software Engineering

Welcome to the main course website where you can find the everything you need to know about the course.

📌 Quick Links

• Read Course Syllabus -- Course policies, expectations, and grading scheme.
• Join Piazza -- Questions and announcements.
• GitHub Enterprise -- access your term project repo using your CWL account.
• Go to Canvas Dashboard -- See grades.
• PrairieLearn -- Submit lab assignments, and project questions.
• iClicker -- Respond to in-class polls.

🗓️ Semester Roadmap

The course moves outward: from design decisions inside a single class, to the boundaries between modules, to the systems and processes that hold a codebase together over time. Every unit answers the same question at a wider radius — what does it cost to change this, and why?

Unit	Weeks
Unit 1: Design in the small	1–5
Unit 2: Layers & interfaces	6–7
Unit 3: Requirements & specification	9–11
Unit 4: Software process	12–13

Course materials overview — what each unit covers and why it's ordered this way. Schedule — dates, slides, labs, and deadlines.

🛠️ Project at a Glance

You will not be starting from a blank repository. You inherit a working system that already satisfies two published API versions — and then you have to change it.

Four deliverables, escalating in scope: add a feature and feel where the design fights you, make it testable, design a third API version with a partner, then build it. Dates are on the schedule.

Code is necessary but not sufficient. Every deliverable ships three things: the code, the design rationale behind it, and the process evidence showing how it came to be. See the syllabus for how this is graded.