A major part of all software engineering projects is being able to report accurately and on time.  For all your assignments, and for your professional life in the future, you are encouraged to

• set your personal deadline earlier than the official deadline
• keep backups of all your important files
• make sure that no-one else has access to your files or documents

Late work will not be accepted. Develop good working habits and manage your time well. If your contributions are seriously affected by illness or misadventure do your utmost to contact the convenor before the due date.  If the severity of the disruption warrants it, you should consider applying for special consideration.

If you receive special consideration for the final exam, a supplementary exam will be scheduled for a time in December 2020. By making a special consideration application for the final exam you are declaring yourself available to sit during the supplementary examination period and you will not be eligible for a second special consideration approval based on pre-existing commitments. Please ensure you are familiar with the policy prior to submitting an application. Approved applicants will receive an individual notification approximately one week prior to the exam with the exact date and time of the supplementary examination.

Finally a remark about hurdle assessments:

Students are required to perform satisfactorily to meet the hurdle requirement.  If a student makes a serious attempt, but fails to meet the hurdle requirement for a particular item of assessment, then he or she will be offered one further opportunity to meet the hurdle requirement.  In this unit we expect students to reach a pass level (50%) in these assessment items, but, recognising that they are designed as an aid to learning (they are formative), the hurdle requirement will be merely 40%.  Students obtaining between 30% and 40% on an assessment item will be given a further assessment task to allow them another opportunity to demonstrate the performance required to meet the hurdle.

In other words, in this unit we define 'satisfactory' as at least 40%, and 'serious attempt' as at least 30%.

Learning Locations

COMP2050 is taught in 2020 via on-line lectures and synchronous, including some face-to-face, Workshops (mixed classes) which are two hours long and take place in various locations generally on level 1 of 9WW (formerly E6A) at a time assigned to each student individually.

Textbook

The textbook for COMP2050 is Software Engineering:  A practitioner's approach by Roger S. Pressman and Bruce Maxim, McGraw Hill, 2020.  You may also consider using earlier editions of this text which, while not quite as up-to-date, are frequently cheaper.  Additional unit content will be presented in lectures and practical classes.  There will also be some other assigned readings, and there are many books that can be consulted for reference material.

Lectures

Digital recordings of parts of lectures are expected to be available. Note that some of the planned lecture activities are interactive, and it is unlikely that you would be able to understand what was happening if you were not present for the original lecture.  In addition, some confidential case-studies may be presented in lectures but will not be recorded.  So lectures will overall be presented as a combination of pre-recorded lecture material and interactive discussions of that material each week.  You need to keep yourself available to interact at the appointed lecture times which are on Tuesdays at 1pm for one hour and on Fridays from 11am to 1pm.  More information will be provided in the first lecture, at 1pm on Tuesday July 28.

Website

Extra course materials, some online discussions, and the submission of assessable work, will be carried out via iLearn.

The unit will make use of discussion boards hosted within iLearn.  Feel free to post questions there -- the discussion boards will be monitored by the staff teaching the unit. Everyone is encouraged to engage with the discussion and provide questions and/or answers.  Such discussions will generally be about the material treated in comp2050, but other aspects of Software Engineering may be discussed too.  We are a "community of interest" and we are here to learn about software engineering (including the software engineering taught in comp2050, but not only the software engineering taught in comp2050!). 

If you have a personal question it is usually more appropriate to email the lecturer teaching during that week or the unit convenor.

Teaching and Learning Strategies

The feedback that you receive plays a crucial role in your learning. You have many opportunities to seek and receive feedback. During lectures, you are encouraged to ask the lecturer questions to clarify anything you might not be sure of. To ensure you don't miss feedback make sure that you 1) review your marked assignments, 2) read unit emails and information at the unit website and 3) attend lectures which are often used to point out what was expected in assessable work and to provide examples of good solutions and/or examples of common errors.

Lectures are used to motivate engagement with and reinforcement of the unit's subject matter. While most lectures are planned to be recorded, some activities such as role plays and dramas conducted in the lecture will not be captured properly in the recording. Volunteers to participate in role plays may be requested in the lecture, please consider whether you can contribute in this way.  Lectures will of course include a significant amount of learning material, but even more importantly they include contextual material and learning activities that "make meaning" of the subject matter.

Workshops are smaller group classes which give you the opportunity to interact with your peers and with a tutor who has sound knowledge of the subject. Workshops will require working in small groups and sometimes involve reporting back to the class. The classes will focus on reinforcing understanding of the concepts and their practical applications to problems. It is important that you participate in the activities and make some notes from them to assist you with revision of the material.

Note carefully that lecture material and workshop material have only some overlap, and each learning experience is designed to help you to learn different things.  You need to pay careful attention to, and take notes from, both kinds of classes throughout the semester.

Assignments will play a key role in providing formative evaluation so that students and the teachers can gauge levels of understanding. Assignments will be related to the lecture, practical and tutorial material and require students to bring together what they have been learning, and to think creatively and rigorously.

Exams will be designed to test your understanding of the course content and your application of the concepts to a number of scenarios or problem statements.

Each week you should:

• Attend lectures, take notes, ask questions
• Complete the weekly questions and submit them via ilearn
• Attend your workshop and seek feedback from your tutor on your work
• Read assigned reading material, add to your notes and prepare questions for your lecturer or tutor
• Start working on any assignments immediately after they have been released.

The topic titles are indicative, and may be subject to change.

The unit comp2050 changes every year as the software engineering programs at Macquarie are further developed and as we take account of student feedback on previous offerings. While the intended outcomes remain substantially the same as offerings of COMP255, students should not assume that any particular aspects of comp2050 this year will be in any particular ways similar to those aspects of previous years' offerings of COMP255.

Changes for this year (Semester 2, 2020):

• the experimental assignment 1 tried in 2019 will not be repeated
• assignment 1 and assignment 2 are co-dependent -- students will need to participate in assignment 1 in order to complete assignment 2
• there will be lecture material emphasising the purpose and importance of the unit for students' likely future careers
• hurdles have been maintained because of their demonstrated effectiveness in aiding student learning, but adjusted in the light of COVID-19.

At the end of the session, you will receive a mark that reflects your achievement in the unit. 

The final mark for the unit will be calculated by combining the marks for all assessment tasks according to the percentage weightings shown in the assessment summary.  

 No late submissions for the weekly problems and the assignments.