Editing Software Engineering (Fall 2025) (section)

== Overview and Learning Objectives ==
Software engineering is a collection of practices, philosophies, skills, and strategies for building and maintaining software.

As students of software engineering in the twenty-first century, I expect that many of you taking this course will, after graduation, work in jobs that involve the building and maintaining of technology, although your day to day activities may look as varied as stress-testing hardware to imagining new front-end interactions to reviewing piles of data to understand a system compromise to jumping out of bed in the middle of the night to fix an angry database. This class seeks to inform these experiences by helping you learn the engineering processes and practices in common use in a range of industries and settings, and how to think more broadly and more deeply about software work.

I will consider the course a complete success if every student is able to do all of these things at the end of the quarter:

* Write and speak fluently about key concepts in software engineering
* Recall, compare, and give examples of software engineering approaches that evidence suggests will be more or less successful
* Demonstrate an ability to critically apply ideas from the course to a demonstrator project.
* Engage with the course material and compellingly present your own ideas and reflections in writing and orally.
* Learn and use engineering tools, in part because the tools themselves are important, and in part to build your ability to adopt new tools.
* Identify areas of ethical concern in software engineering.
* Identify opportunities to improve software security in software engineering.

I also have a "stretch goal": I want your work in this class to help you, in some direct way. Maybe it's having a great answer in a job interview when it's time to convince the interviewer that you have a lot to offer. Maybe it's having a piece of work you can feel good about sharing with others. Maybe it's applying your CSS360 thinking to a new assignment at work. Maybe it's seeing your world in a new way that helps you solve a problem. Or maybe it's just having an answer when someone asks skeptical questions about what you got out of studying Software Engineering! This goal is hard to measure but it's my hope for you and what I'm working for every day during the quarter.

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