NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT
COURANT INSTITUTE OF MATHEMATICAL SCIENCES
SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Spring 2021 - Jean-Claude FRANCHITTI
(CSCI-GA.2440-001 - Mon. 7:10 - 9:00 pm)
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Successful software development depends on an in-depth
understanding of how the phases and supporting activities of
the software development life cycle work together. Each phase
of the life cycle process contributes to a reliable,
maintainable product that satisfies user requirements. The
application of good engineering practices throughout the
cycle dramatically improves the likelihood of delivering a
quality software project on time, in scope and within budget.
While there are many rigorous methodologies, in fact most
approaches and tools have a mixture of strengths and
weaknesses. Traditional development approaches result in
models that are incomplete and quickly become out-of-sync
with the application source code. Many modeling approaches
focus on describing software designs, rather than solving
business problems. Curiously, the various process models,
including traditional SDLCs, Agile methods, DevOps, Design
Thinking, Lean Startup, and others do not seem to provide a
reliable all-encompassing end-to-end solution to software
development. Therefore, it is important to understand how the
various methods differs and/or complement each other.
This course presents modern software engineering techniques
and examines the software development life-cycle (SDLC),
including software specification, design, implementation,
testing and maintenance. The course evaluates past and
current trends in software development practices including
agile software development methods, DevOps, and Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE) as described below.
• Non-agile approaches that are still widely used in
industry today and are covered in the course include the
Rational Unified Process (RUP) and the Open Process
Framework (OPF). Process improvement initiatives such as
