Beginning Developers: Free Course from MIT

arrogance writes "Yes, this has been posted on /., and on Wired (five days after the /. story). But there are occasional postings on slashdot about Where to Start Learning to Program. There's a software engineering course at the MIT site that looks like it covers many of the basics of software development, from OO to testing to documentation. It also deals with a team based project end-to-end, which is a great way to learn, but it might be tough finding two or three like minded people to take the course with. Has anyone tried these courses? Are they any good? Have any slashdotters (is that a word?) taken the course "live"?"

Comments

not impressed

[jilles]

As a Ph. D. student in a software engineering research group, I'm somewhat knowledgeable about software engineering education. I must say I thought the course is a typical example of a course compiled by someone who has never been involved in a project larger than 'hello world'.

The biggest misconception here is that software engineering somehow is about programming. In a large scale software project, the actual programming is only something like between 10% and 20% of the effort. The rest goes into negotiating requirements, design, testing, planning, dealing with the fact that there are multiple people involved (i.e. project managers, customers, designers, marketing, other programmers). Actually convincing students that this is true is a huge challenge, most won't find out until after they are working on large industrial projects.

This course only prepares them for the 10-20% of coding. Like a good academic course it has a strong focus on designs (I have never seen a large industrial scale software project with up to date, detailed designs) and the actual programming concerns small toy programs. What it doesn't prepare them for is large scale software (>=100 KLOC) various development methods, various testing methods and their flaws, maintenance (very few projects actually start from scratch), projectmanagement, the fact that customer requirements will continue to change, internal and external conflicts about who does what and when, etc. Various very thick software engineering books exist (e.g. Sommerville or van Vliet), implementation is not the main focus in those books.

"An introduction to OO modeling and programming" would be a more appropriate name for the course.

A proper Software Engineering course involves letting large groups of students work on a medium sized project (for example provided by local software companies) and teaching them about the principles of software engineering (using e.g. the books mentioned earlier). Even that won't prepare them fully but at least they will experience strugling with deadlines, colleagues, changing requirements and interacting with customers. We have done just this in the past two years at the university of Groningen in the Netherlands.