Student Blogs - Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley - Carnegie Mellon University

Student Blogs

MS in Software Engineering, Development Management Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Development Track program.

Linda is a first year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Developer at Electronic Arts in Redwood Shores, CA. She likes to dance and sing and her favorite videogame is The Beatles RockBand. She enjoys Indian, Japanese, Thai, Italian and Mexican food. She comes from Mexico City, and has being living in CA for the past two years.
Pras Sarkar is a second-year part-time student in the MS Software Engineering Development Management track. He works in Yahoo! Labs. His responsibilities include materializing ideas and concepts into engaging prototypes and demos, some of which ultimately mature into products that Yahoo! visitors use everyday. He is interested in emerging web technologies, social interaction over digital mediums, and creative interfaces that push the boundaries of human computer interaction.
Vineet is a Lead Developer at Boeing and a second year grad student in the part-time MS Software Engineering, Development Management program. He loves reading, playing with his daughter and pursuing the religious aspect of his life. He is an active volunteer of Vedic Cultural Center, a Seattle-based organization dedicated to promote the Vedic (ancient Indian) arts, culture, music and dance.
Truc is a second year part-time student in Carnegie Mellon's MS Software Engineering, Development Management track. She is a Software Engineer at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale, CA. She loves food and enjoys anything related to food: going to different restaurants, cooking, watching the Food Network, and of course, eating!

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Foundations of Software Engineering – Presentation Time!

Hello, Everyone! Hope you have been getting an understanding on how the CMU West program works by reading all our blogs.

I’m now going to update you on what’s been going on since the last time I’ve talked to you. I’m currently in the fourth and final iteration of our project assignment in the Foundations of Software Engineering class. Our final presentation is this Thursday, December 6th. So everyone in our team is working away trying to get all the implementation, testing, and presentation slides done and ready. I’m actually very excited for the final presentation. I’m eager to see how the other teams have implemented the project and how our program fares against them.

In the past few weeks we have started getting more into the coding aspect of the class. We have learned to use software like XPlanner to divide up each idea into story cards and tasks. This has helped a lot; and looking back, I wish we had learned to use it better. The way we started coding is by splitting up the code by the UI and the database layer. We would assign two people to each end. And we each jumped around to try to learn every aspect of the code better. I liked this way of doing things since I wasn’t very strong in either end and this gave me a great chance to learn both sides.

Since you caught me toward the end of this class, I’m in a reflective state of mind. What has been done and how could we have done it better and what did I learn? This class forces you to think about those questions at the end of every iteration so the next is smoother. Our team has had some bumps, mainly related to finding a common time for meetings, but overall it has been a relatively smooth process. We inherited code and had to learn that code base and make the call on when to rewrite some things and when to keep what we have. We added a few new features which we will highlight through a demo to our VP of Marketing and VP of Engineering (both roles played by faculty members). Overall I think we have gotten a thorough understanding of the software development cycle from requirements to release. And we’re almost done; this is the final stretch,

Wish me luck!

Happy Holidays,

Sirisha

posted by Sirisha @ 3:13 PM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Previous Posts