Data	Topic and Notes	Assignments	Reading For This Class
T Sep 01	What is Software Engineering? [overview] (no attendance/participation check)	Some homeworks are posted. Start early!	Read the HW6 Specification so you can think about it early!
R Sep 03	Process, Risk and Scheduling [overview] (no attendance/participation check)		S. Keshav's How to Read a Paper (many students may not be familiar with how to efficiently and effectively read technical papers, and outlines one skill for how to do so) Wikipedia's Software Development Process (Introduction and Methodology) Buse and Zimmermann's Information Needs for Software Development Analytics (if you are low on time, read only Sections I-V) [Microsoft] Note: some students report that Safari may display paper PDFs incorrectly. Optional: "How well do real companies plan and estimate effort?" Find out in: Anda et al.'s Variability and Reproducibility in Software Engineering: A Study of Four Companies that Developed the Same System [Simula]
T Sep 08	Measurement [overview] (no attendance/participation check)	Policy Checklist Due (future quizzes may not be posted on this page) HW 0 (Dev Setup) Due	Begel and Zimmermann's Analyze This! 145 Questions for Data Scientists in Software Engineering [Microsoft] EECS 481's Improving Scheduling and Four Helpful Habits HW1 Specification Optional: "How does measurement bias relate to software?" Find out in: Mytkowicz et al.'s Producing Wrong Data Without Doing Anything Obviously Wrong!" [IBM] Alternative: Don't want to read the Mytkowicz paper? Watch the video instead!
R Sep 10	Quality Assurance and Testing [qa]	HW 1a (Test Coverage) Due	Sections 2.0 to 2.5 of Henderson's Software Engineering at Google [Google] Wikipedia's Quality Assurance (Introduction, Approaches and In Practice sections) Wikipedia's Software Testing Optional: "How does Google test each change to all of its software?" Find out in: Memon et al.'s Taming Google-Scale Continuous Testing [Google]
T Sep 15	Test Suite Quality Metrics [qa]		Wikipedia's Code Coverage Wikipedia's Mutation Testing (Introduction, Overview, Goals, Mutation Testing Overview, Mutation Operators) Optional: "How did mutation testing improve code review feedback by over 60% for over 10,000 code authors at Google?" Find out in: Petrovic and Ivankovic's State of Mutation Testing at Google [Google] Optional: "Do coverage metrics really help with critical projects?" Find out in: Dupuy and Leveson's An Empirical Evaluation of the MC/DC Coverage Criterion on the HETE-2 Satellite Software [Alcatel]
R Sep 17	Test Inputs, Oracles and Generation [qa]	HW 1b, 1c and 1d (Test Coverage) Due	Dave Rensin's Elephants, Goldfish and the New Golden Age of Software Engineering Read up to, but not including, "Program-Specific Checkers" in Zeller's Fuzzing: Breaking Things with Random Inputs Tillmann and de Halleux's Pex — White Box Test Generation for .NET (this project became IntelliTest in Visual Studio) [Microsoft] Optional: "What's the state of the art in test oracles?" Find out in: Barr et al.'s The Oracle Problem in Software Testing: A Survey Optional: "Can fuzz testing find security bugs?" Find out in: Godefroid et al.'s Automated Whitebox Fuzz Testing [Microsoft]
T Sep 22	Code Inspection and Review [qa]		Wikipedia's Code Review Bacchelli and Bird's Expectations, outcomes, and challenges of modern code review [Microsoft] HW2 Specification Optional: "How does gender relate to GitHub pull requests?" Find out in: Terrell et al.'s Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men Optional: "How can we automatically resolve merge conflicts?" Find out in MergeResolver — Automatic Merge Conflict Resolution [GrammaTech] Optional: "Where do invariants come from?" Find out in: Ernst et al.'s The Daikon system for dynamic detection of likely invariants
R Sep 24	Dynamic Analysis Tools [qa]		Wikipedia's Dynamic Program Analysis Musuvathi et al.'s Finding and Reproducing Heisenbugs in Concurrent Programs (Abstract, Sections 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7) [Microsoft] Optional: "Can you give me code and skills to make it easier to do something like the Elephant-Goldfish agentic model?" Find out in: Jesse Vincent's Superpowers: An agentic skills framework & software development methodology that works. on GitHub Optional: "How can we detect locking bugs?" Find out in: Savage et al.'s Eraser: A Dynamic Data Race Detector for Multithreaded Programs [Digital]
T Sep 29	Pair Programming and Skill Interviews [coding]	HW 2 (Test Automation) Due (reminder: assignments are due at listed times even if there are temporary power or networking issues)	Wikipedia's Pair Programming Cockburn and Williams' The Costs and Benefits of Pair Programming Dean Jackson's The Google Technical Interview [Google] Section 4.1 of Henderson's Software Engineering at Google [Google] Optional: "What did a survey of over 46,000 comments find out about modern technical interviews?" Find out in: Behroozi et al.'s Hiring is Broken: What Do Developers Say About Technical Interviews? [Microsoft] Optional: "What can go wrong in pair programming?" Find out in: Lewis and Shah's How Equity and Inequity Can Emerge in Pair Programming Optional: "How do Agile and Waterfall compare?" Find out in: Hosking's Agile Projects Have Become Waterfall Projects With Sprints
R Oct 01	Defect Reporting and Triage [bugs]		Wikipedia's Bug tracking system Bettenburg et al.'s What Makes a Good Bug Report? (Abstract, Sections 1, 3, and 9) [Apache, Eclipse, Mozilla] Optional: "Are testers more neurotic than developers?" Find out in Smith et al.'s Beliefs, Practices, and Personalities of Software Engineers: A Survey in a Large Software Company [Microsoft]
T Oct 06	Static & Dataflow Analysis (1/2) [qa]	Don't Neglect HW 3 (Mutation Testing)!: studying for other things while completing HW 3 is difficult	Wikipedia's Static Program Analysis Ayewah et al.'s Experiences Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs [Google] Optional: "How does Microsoft find bugs in critical device drivers?" Find out in: Ball et al.'s A Decade of Software Model Checking with SLAM [Microsoft] Optional: "What are deployment challenges for static analysis?" Find out in: Bessey et al.'s A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World [Coverity]
R Oct 08	Static & Dataflow Analysis (2/2) [qa]		Schwartz-Narbonne's How to integrate formal proofs into software development [Amazon] Wikipedia's Data-flow Analysis (Introduction, Basic Principles, Iterative Algorithm and Examples) HW3 Specification Additional background: Wikipedia's Basic Block (Introduction and Definition)
T Oct 13	Fault Localization and Profiling [bugs]	HW 3 (Mutation Testing) Due	Wikipedia's Profiling Parnin and Orso's Are Automated Debugging Techniques Actually Helping Programmers? (if low on time, can skip Sections 2 and 4) Graham et al.'s gprof: a Call Graph Execution Profiler (Abstract, Sections 1, 2, 3 and 5) HW4 Specification Optional: "How can we collect per-path information?" Find out in: Ball and Larus's Efficient Path Profiling [Microsoft] Optional: "What other fault localization techniques exist?" Find out in: Wong and Debroy's A Survey of Software Fault Localization
W Oct 14	—	Exam #1, 6:00pm
R Oct 15	Debugging as Hypothesis Testing [bugs]		Sections 2.7 to 2.10 of Henderson's Software Engineering at Google [Google] Andreas Zeller's Automated Debugging: Are We Close? Alternative: George Necula's lecture on Delta Debugging at Berkeley may provide a nice alternative to the presentation in this class. Optional: For more information on this project, visit: Zeller's Delta Debugging: from automated testing to automated debugging
T Oct 20	— (No Class: Fall Break)	—	—
R Oct 22	Requirements and Specifications [design]		Wikipedia's Requirements Elicitation Peter K. Shultz's Being a PM [Microsoft] Spolsky's How To Be A Program Manager [Stack Overflow] Zowghi and Coulin's Requirements Elicitation: A Survey of Techniques, Approaches and Tools (read up through 2.3, and then skip to and read 2.6) HW5 Specification
T Oct 27	Maya Kosteski, AI Engineer at Amazon AWS [guest]	(there can be questions about guest lectures on reading quizzes) HW 4 (Defect Detection) Due
R Oct 29	Elicitation, Validation and Risk [design]	(looking into HW 6a projects early improves outcomes)	Abstract, Section 1 and Section 2 of Bjarnason et al.'s Challenges and practices in aligning requirements with verification and validation: a case study of six companies (first 5.5 pages only) Sinofsky's PM at Microsoft (cached copy) [Microsoft] Optional: "How do safety-critical industries formalize and mitigate such risks?" Find out in: Wikipedia's Fault Tree Analysis
T Nov 03	Designing for Maintainability [design]	(we recommend overlapping HW 6a with HW 5)	Up to and including Section II-B of Liu et al.'s Automatic Generation of Pull Request Descriptions (the rest is optional) Malkwai's The art of software systems development: Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, Performance (RAMP) (read up through the 4 "Cases" and then skip to and read the Discussion) Spolsky's Things You Should Never Do, Part 1 [Stack Overflow]
R Nov 05	Patterns and Anti-Patterns [design]	HW 5 (Debugging Automation) Due	Wikipedia's Software Design Pattern HW6 Specification Optional: "How do design patterns work in industry?" Find out in: Beck et al.'s Industrial Experience with Design Patterns [AT&T, Motorola, Siemens, IBM]
T Nov 10	Code Inspection and the Brain [coding, qa]		Floyd et al.'s Decoding the representation of code in the brain: An fMRI study of code review and expertise (skip Sections II, III and IV) Siegmund et al.'s Measuring Neural Efficiency of Program Comprehension (skip Sections 3 and 7) [Microsoft] Optional: "What did reddit think of this?" Find out in: Does the brain interact with programming languages like it does with natural languages?
R Nov 12	Productivity (bring a coding laptop!) [coding]	HW 6a (Contribution) Due	See special reading instructions
T Nov 17	Dave Rensin, Distinguished Engineer At Google [guest]	(there can be questions about guest lectures on reading quizzes)
R Nov 19	Automatic Program Repair [overview]		Marginean et al.'s SapFix: Automated End-to-End Repair at Scale [Facebook] Monperrus et al.'s Repairnator patches programs automatically Optional: "Can smaller companies use automated repair?" Find out in: Haraldsson et al.'s Fixing Bugs in Your Sleep: How Genetic Improvement Became an Overnight Success [Janus] Optional: "How does mutation relate to automated repair?" Find out in: Le Goues et al.'s A Systematic Study of Automated Program Repair: Fixing 55 out of 105 Bugs for $8 Each Optional: "How can we repair 50% of standard compilation errors with neural machine translation?" Find out in: Mesbah et al.'s DeepDelta: Learning to Repair Compilation Errors [Google]
T Nov 24	Guest Lecture: To Be Announced	(there can be questions about guest lectures on reading quizzes)
R Nov 26	— (No Class: Thanksgiving Break)	—	—
T Dec 01	Debugging Minds [coding]		McLoughlin et al.'s Programmers’ Visual Attention on Function Call Graphs During Code Summarization(read only Sections I, III.E, IV, and VII) Optional: "How does this relate to software metrics?" Find out in Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study Optional: "Can we make you better at programming via Neurostimulation?" Ahmad et al.'s Causal Relationships and Programming Outcomes: A Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Experiment (skip Sections 2, 3, 4, and 9)
R Dec 03	AI and Software Engineering #1 [overview]		Optional: "How well can LLMs automate an entire vehicle API testing pipeline?" Find out in: Wang et al.'s Automating a Complete Software Test Process Using LLMs: An Automotive Case Study [Volvo]
T Dec 08	AI and Software Engineering #2 [overview]	Don't Neglect HW 6b (Contribution)! (see below about no late submissions)	M. Endres et al.'s Can Large Language Models Transform Natural Language Intent into Formal Method Postconditions? (up to, and including, Section 3.2.1) [Microsoft]
W Dec 09	—	Exam #2, 6:00pm
R Dec 10	TBA	HW 6b (Contribution) Due (cannot be accepted later than this, please plan accordingly)
Mon Dec 14	—	All Course Materials Due