Assignment 2, WASP Software Engineering Course

This assignment requires you to write an essay on Software Engineering and how it relates to your research. Please only use diagrams/illustrations if necessary, and do not count these towards the length of the essay. The essay should be a minimum of 2.0 A4 pages in length, and a maximum of 3 A4 pages in length. The font should be Times New Roman (or equivalent) and 11 point.

The essay should be structured as follows:

1. Begin with an introduction/abstract to your research and topic area. This should be a maximum of 200 words.

2. Choose three topics from the following list:

1. Automated Software Testing
2. Sustainability (of software products and/or (internally for) developers/engineering)
3. Requirements Engineering
4. Architecture and Design
5. Behavioral Software Engineering (psychology in SE)
6. Human factors
7. Human-Computer Interaction
8. Continuous Deployment
9. Project Management
10. Security and Privacy
11. Maintenance and Evolution
12. Regulations and Compliance

For each of the three topics you have selected, discuss your understanding of them. Describe areas of opportunity (new research challenges, commercial opportunities, application of Software Engineering ideas, methods and tools in AI/ML) with regard to these topics and your area of interest/research. This should be approximately 1.5 A4 pages in length. Use the course slides, links/resources, and papers to inform your thinking and writing but be sure to think on your own and relate the topics to your own experience and project.

3. Discuss your thoughts regarding the future trends and directions of Software Engineering in relation to your topic, your career (either in academia or in industry), and AI/ML in general. This should be approximately 1 A4 page in length. You can choose the topics/nature of the discussion, but could include:

ML will "eat Software", i.e. most software development will be the training/development of ML models with only minimal "glue" code to integrate models
Data Science and ML will just become another part of Software Engineering since it is just another "form" for the software
Software Engineering will just become a part of Data Science and ML since it is just providing general "glue" code and activities and not core software components
ML and Data Science is different enough from software development that the areas will develop independently into separate areas with little/no connection
ML training will be online and happen in real-time in most running Software systems; software engineering needs to adapt to this reality

Submission

Submit your report in both raw/text format (preferably Markdown (.md) or Latex (.tex), contact Robert on email if you have reasons to not use any of them) and as a PDF by creating a Pull Request to the course git repo on GitHub: https://github.com/robertfeldt/wasp_SE_course

Create your own directory under the "assignments/students" directory and the put your assignment 1 files (see above) in your directory and submit as a Pull Request. Dir: https://github.com/robertfeldt/wasp_SE_course/tree/main/assignments/students

Deadline for submission of report files: At 14:00 the day that is two weeks after day 2 of the course, to be scheduled.

Assessment

Assessment will be light, and reports will be judged either “pass” or “fail”. A pass will occur when your paper is deemed to show original work and thought (i.e. do NOT copy/paste from any source, even if you are referring to a paper/article) and is of the required length.

Other information

This is intended as a light piece of work – do not over think it, just give your thoughts and perspectives. However, also be serious and show you have given this some effort (i.e. don’t be lazy and provide no insight).

If you have any questions email robert.feldt@chalmers.se