Prof: Damith Chatura Rajapakse

CS2103T teaches students software engineering practices, throughout this module, students mainly work on 2 projects: 1 individual and 1 team based. This module must be taken alongside CS2101, which is a presentation module and also where you form your teams for the team project in this module.

The theory in this module has a heavy focus on learning diagrams that communicate software architecture and design, alongside effective design principles, understanding user requirements, and test case design. The full textbook can be read online here.

The projects in this module also teaches students how to develop on a medium-sized JavaFX application using Java 17. Throughout the projects, students also learn how to build projects with Gradle, use static analysis tools in IDEs, use dynamic analysis tools like Codecov, CI with GitHub Actions, and how to use GitHub, including forking projects and making PRs.

Everything you need for the module is on the website, which made it quite convenient. I would say the admin for this module is pretty well done, and a lot of things are automated well. There are even dashboards for us to easily keep track of our progress for the projects which was very helpful.

Another graded component is the practical exam, where students have to find bugs in other teams project, and submit accurate reports on at most 6 bugs in the assigned project.

The teaching team also maintains GitMastery, an app to teach students how to use Git, however I personally did not use this app so I can not give any comments about it.

Personal opinion

This is a decent module that is handled very well by the teaching team. Prof Damith is clearly very passionate about teaching and responds very timely to questions on the forums and emails, even past midnight. Students new to software engineering are sure to learn a lot through the lectures and practical projects.

Projects

As someone with experience in Java, JavaFX, and Git/GitHub, I did not find the projects to be too challenging. The individual project was very hand-holdy, so even students with little experience should be able to follow through. Beginner programmers may struggle with the team project, as they are handed a ~6k LOC codebase to start with, and there's heavy use of OOP (almost excessively) throughout the codebase.

Personally, I disliked how the structure of the team project incentivizes you to write less features, and to an extent even remove features from the app. The reason being that less features = less bugs to be deducted, more features also stretches the amount of time you can spend squashing bugs in your project.

Theory

There is a weekly quiz you have to do that is mostly based on the theory gone through in the lecture, but these quizzes do not change every semester so hit up your seniors. I disliked the over-emphasis on UML diagrams which I don't believe to be that prevalent in the industry. A big part of the assessments was on spotting mistakes in UML diagrams, some of which are just minor notational mistakes. Most of the other theory contents seem to be useful to new students. Personally I did not read the theory for the whole semester up till the 2 days leading up to the finals, the theory is really not hard at all, you just have to memorise it.

Practical Exam

I got lucky with the group I got assigned to because their project was riddled with bugs, but if you are unlucky you can still point out feature flaws (where a feature could have been implemented better with minimal effort) or documentation bugs. I would advise groups to actually spend time polishing their user and developer guide, as my team received a lot of reports nitpicking about things in the documentation, which we were forced to accept.

Overall

Overall this was a pretty chill mod where I didn't have to spend much time every week working on. Most CS students will benefit from the practical components where they gain experience on how to handle large software projects in a team setting.

Workload: 5/10

Enjoyability: 6/10

Difficulty: 3/10

Grade breakdown

Assessment	Marks	LQ	Med	UQ
Participation	5/5	5	5	5
Individual Project	15/15	15	15	15
Team Project	TBA/50
Finals	TBA/30
Total	TBA/100

Excepted grade: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Final grade: A