Software engineering is related to the creation of high-quality software systems as well as to their maintenance and support. This is often done in larger teams and needs developers with the most different skills. As software engineering is more than “just” programming. Other important activities are related to the analysis of requirements to a software product, the drafting of a good internal structure of the product (also referred to as software architecture) and quality control. In the module “software engineering” the students get acquainted with these activities and related development procedures.

Software is an immaterial product and this particularity is why software engineering differs from traditional engineering disciplines. Greater attention is paid to information abstraction, modelling, organization and presentation, to reuse and adaptation of solutions and to the administration of changes. Related methods, technologies and tools for modelling and programming complex software systems are introduced in this module. Particular attention is paid to object-oriented development approaches as these are de facto industry standards.

The module is one of the few modules which last two terms. The students attend lectures and tutorials in the 3rd term. The skills acquired here will be applied in the project work they implement in term 3 and 4, intensively supervised by the teaching staff. The students learn to autonomously organize themselves in smaller teams to jointly develop complex software solutions.

Here are some comments of students who completed their project in summer term 2017:

My personal experience with software development: Software cannot be created „just somehow“ – it needs careful and continuous work on the given problem.

Continuous consultation with the co-developers was needed. Merging the software out of its components on submission day might sound nice, but will not work.

The group work significantly reduced workload, but created a lot of it on the other side.

After all, it was a nice experience to have the software available after this long way to go.