Engineering Practices for Building Quality Software

Engineering Practices for Building Quality Software

This course is part of Software Development Lifecycle Specialization

Instructor: Kevin Wendt

What you'll learn

You will learn how to quantiatively measure design quality attributes.
You will establish feasible and testable scenarios for evaluating quality attributes in software architecture.
You will develop skills to ensure quality in developing code beyond correct functionality alone.
You will understand quality approaches to post-development stages of the lifecycle.

Skills you'll gain

Details to know

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Assessments

3 assignments

Taught in English

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This course is part of the Software Development Lifecycle Specialization

When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Specialization.

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There are 5 modules in this course

Agile embraces change which means that team should be able to effectively make changes to the system as team learns about users and market. To be good at effectively making changes to the system, teams need to have engineering rigor and excellence else embracing change becomes very painful and expensive.

In this course, you will learn about engineering practices and processes that agile and traditional teams use to make sure the team is prepared for change. In additional, you will also learn about practices, techniques and processes that can help team build high quality software. You will also learn how to calculate a variety of quantitative metrics related to software quality. This is an intermediate course, intended for learners with a background in software development. To succeed in the course, you should have experience developing in modern programming languages (e.g., Java, C#, Python, JavaScript), an understanding of software development lifecycle models, familiarity with UML diagrams (class and sequence diagrams), and a desire to better understand quality aspects of software development beyond program correctness. At the end of this course, you will be able to comfortably and effectively participate in various techniques and processes for building secure and high quality software.

In this module, you will be introduced to the concept of quality as it relates to software.

What's included

1 video1 reading

In this module, you will learn about a variety of quality metrics including how to calculate them. A discussion of design patterns follows, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of the quality they provide and exposure to several important patterns.

What's included

7 videos11 readings1 assignment2 discussion prompts

7 videosTotal 42 minutes

What is good design?5 minutesPreview module
Measuring Coupling6 minutes
Measuring Cohesion2 minutes
Additional Measures of Quality9 minutes
Introduction to Patterns and the Observer Pattern5 minutes
Strategy Pattern6 minutes
Adapter Pattern6 minutes

11 readingsTotal 160 minutes

Quality Attributes according to Microsoft10 minutes
CMU SEI Technical Report on Quality Attributes30 minutes
Coupling Factor10 minutes
Lack of Cohesion of Methods25 minutes
Lack of Documentation (as a metric)10 minutes
Metric Definitions - SonarQube15 minutes
Further Reading on Observer Pattern10 minutes
Further Readings on Strategy Pattern #115 minutes
Further Readings on Strategy Pattern #215 minutes
Further Readings on Adapter #110 minutes
Further Readings on Adapter #210 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 20 minutes

Quality in Design20 minutes

2 discussion promptsTotal 20 minutes

What is Software?10 minutes
Are these useful?10 minutes

In this module, you will create Scenarios in order to document and verify quality attributes relevant to software architecture, including usability, performance, and more. Then, you will examine one specific quality attribute and its implications: security.

What's included

7 videos1 reading1 peer review

7 videosTotal 39 minutes

What is Software Architecture?4 minutesPreview module
Architectural Styles5 minutes
View, Viewpoint, and Perspective4 minutes
Writing Scenarios7 minutes
Security Perspective6 minutes
Attack Trees5 minutes
Security Tactics6 minutes

1 readingTotal 15 minutes

ISO/IEC/IEEE Systems and software engineering — Architecture description15 minutes

1 peer reviewTotal 60 minutes

Assessing Quality through Scenarios60 minutes

In this module, you will explore a variety of quality aspects of the implementation stage of the lifecycle. You will also evaluate coding style guides and static analysis tools. Finally, you will analyze self-documentation in open-source code and identify the capabilities of version control and automated build tools.

What's included

7 videos8 readings1 assignment3 peer reviews2 discussion prompts

7 videosTotal 60 minutes

Code Style11 minutesPreview module
Code Style Examples5 minutes
Debugging8 minutes
Static Analysis4 minutes
Commenting10 minutes
Version Control Systems12 minutes
Build Process7 minutes

8 readingsTotal 90 minutes

Tabs vs. Spaces5 minutes
Bad Coding Standards5 minutes
Static Analysis Tools15 minutes
Git and GitHub10 minutes
Intro to Make10 minutes
A closer look at Apache Ant15 minutes
Gradle15 minutes
Comparison: Ant, Maven, and Gradle15 minutes

1 assignmentTotal 30 minutes

Quality in Implementation30 minutes

3 peer reviewsTotal 240 minutes

Code Style90 minutes
Static Analysis60 minutes
Commenting90 minutes

2 discussion promptsTotal 25 minutes

What is good style?15 minutes
Commenting vs. Self-documentation10 minutes

In this module, learners will discover quality in the final lifecycle stages: testing and deployment. Learners will first be instructed on the importance of test planning, understand what it means to evaluate tests and identify the benefits of test-first process. Then, a variety of resources will give learners understanding into continuous pipeline tools, allowing the learner to evaluate their potential benefits (and drawbacks) for their own projects.