Act I — Foundations¶
What are the fundamental activities and structures of software engineering?
Act I establishes the engineering framework students will use throughout the course. As teams form and move through requirements and specification for the semester project, the lectures introduce software process, teamwork, requirements, specification, architecture, design, and validation. The Act concludes with engineering decision-making and metrics, making explicit a pattern that runs throughout these topics: engineers identify consequential decisions, reason about the alternatives and their consequences, and determine what observations or measurements could provide evidence for those decisions.
GenAI is part of that work from the beginning. Students use it to explore alternatives, prototype, and assist with design and implementation, while learning to distinguish what a generated system may do, what it must do, and what evidence supports those beliefs. By the end of Act I, teams should have both a specified project and a framework for making and evaluating engineering decisions under uncertainty.