Essentials of Software Engineering Online and Onsite

Program Description:

Essentials of Software Engineering is a six-week course with one session being offered per week. It is a component of the Software Quality Institute's Software Project Management (SWPM) Certificate Program . SWPM itself contains six courses: this course, Essentials of Software Engineering, plus five others. All six courses are required for certification, but any course may be taken as a stand-alone course. The courses may be taken in any order.

SWPM offers a thorough view of the most up-to-date software best-practices, taught by expert practitioners from industry. With a focus specifically on software, the Essentials of Software Engineering course results in a working knowledge that incorporates quality, applicability, profitability and timeliness.

Course Description:

The Essentials of Software Engineering course addresses the all-important risk management technique of eliciting and modeling the requirements for the software product under development. Student teams, presented with a Software Project Management Plan (SPMP) based on a case study, will use industry-approved tools and techniques for eliciting requirements, modeling the requirements using Structured Methods, Object-Oriented Methods, or a combination of the two, and translating the requirements into a design that leads to efficient executable systems. The SPMP contains cost, effort and schedule estimates that are then refined by the teams, using the knowledge they gained through the requirements and design processes.

Sessions included in the Essentials of Software Engineering course are:

• Introduction to Software Engineering -- Problem solving, using both process and data views of a system
• Requirements Elicitation -- How to get the Right Requirements, and how to construct a solid Software Requirements Specification (SRS)
• Requirements Modeling -- How to get the Requirements Right and Structured Techniques for modeling them
• Object-Oriented Requirements and Analysis Modeling using OO techniques
• Software Design Concepts and Principles for Architecture -- How to prepare a Software Design Document (SDD), incorporating user interface and component designs
• Software Estimation -- How to size (resize) a product, and estimate (re-estimate) its cost and effort

About the Course

Students should be prepared to devote eight to ten hours of time to each session. Participation in the course is team-based and includes completing team and individual exercises as well as weekly conference calls. Students will have the opportunity to work with fellow team members on real-world projects.

Use of an online courseware tool allows students to virtually perform all work within a single application. Participants of the course will receive textbooks, the cost of which is included in the registration fee.

The Program Mentor: You've Got a Friend!

A program mentor, who is an experienced software project manager, guides the individual students and team members through the learning process, in addition to collecting program deliverables and giving feedback to the teams.

Course Benefits:

The student who completes these six sessions, with his or her team, will be able to:

• Describe the Systems Engineering context for Software

• Define Software Engineering
• Apply structural analysis methods to problem solving
• Describe requirements management
• Describe the criticality of accurate requirements elicitation
• Identify the characteristics of a well-written requirement (e.g., primitive, testable)
• List the types of software requirements
• Describe techniques for eliciting requirements: Interviewing, Brainstorming, Mind Mapping, FAST, JAD and Use Case
• Create the artifacts of Structured Analysis: Data Flow Diagram and Entity Relationship Diagram
• Create the artifacts of Structured Design: Structure Chart, State Chart and Chapin Chart
• Create the artifacts of Object Oriented Analysis/Design (OOA/OOD): Class Model, Object Model, Use Case, Activity Diagram, Collaboration Diagram, Sequence Diagram, Interaction Diagram
• Depict a systems context and interactions using package diagrams and interfaces
• Compare and contrast the processes for Structured Analysis/Structured Design versus Object Oriented Analysis/ Object Oriented Design
• List the major steps in software size, effort, duration, and cost estimating
• Explain the difference between LOC, function points and feature points as measurements of software size. Explain model blitz and Delphi as measurement techniques.
• Explain the basic concepts of the COCOMO estimating model

SQI is an approved Project Management Institute (PMI) Registered Education Provider (R.E.P.). Students who are PMP's will earn 42 PDU's for successful completion of this course. Additionally, this course satisfies PMI's 35-hour project management education requirement for students who choose to take the PMI certification examination. Please visit the PMI web site to learn more.

This course qualifies for 4.8 continuing education credits.

Register today to reserve your seat!

Sign up today for the August 22 - September 30, 2005 offering. The registration fee is $1,800 per person if registered on or before July 22, 2005 and $1,850 per person if registered on or after July 22, 2005.

This course can be taught on-site!

REGISTER NOW!