Introduction to Software Development Tooling
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This is the course website for CS 4973: Introduction to Software Development Tooling at Northeastern University, Summer 2 2024. This site holds the authoritative syllabus, as well as lecture notes and assignments.
Note: The course staff reserves the right to change this page at any time without notice. The change history is public. It is being actively changed right now as we update it for Summer 2024.
Overview
Learn tools you’ll be expected to know as a working software engineer, which will help you write better code, collaborate with others, and tackle problems you previously thought impossible.
Effective software development requires more than just coding skill: in industry and academia alike, developers use tools to keep their code maintainable and reliable. In this course, you will learn four fundamental categories of tooling: the command line, version control, build systems, and correctness. We’ll dive deep into one industry-standard tool from each category via hands-on projects and exploration of existing codebases, then survey other tools in the same category and discuss why you might choose one over another. By the end of the course, you will have a robust toolset both to manage complexity in your future projects and to effectively ramp up on software projects you encounter in the real world.
We are teaching this course as a series of four modules. The first, Command Line, will give you an overview of the operating system and tools available to you to make your life as a software engineer easier. The second, VCS, will teach you about how to version control your software with Git, so that you may maintain a history of your changes and collaborate with others. The third, Build, will teach you about how to reliably build your software with Make. The fourth and final module, Correctness, will introduce you to testing and other tools for ensuring that your software meets quality standards.
Administrivia
Instructor: Max Bernstein
Teaching Assistants: TBD
Office Hours: immediately after lecture; extra hours to be announced on Piazza
Discussion board: Piazza (access via Canvas)
Prerequisites: An introductory computer science class and the willingness
to learn a little C
Equipment: A computer with a POSIX shell
Textbook: none
Lectures: Mo-Tu-We-Thu, 9:50am-11:30am, in Dodge Hall Room 173
Assignments: 8 assignments (2 per module), to be submitted on Gradescope
Exams: none
Schedule
Note: We will publish notes or slides for each lecture after it happens, but the lecture recordings will not be available to students. If you require access to recordings for your accommodations, please contact us using a private post on Piazza.
Course philosophy
This course will consist of 25 lectures (unplanned cancellations notwithstanding) and 8 assignments, spaced evenly throughout the semester. There will be no exams. We’ll use the lectures (accompanied by written lecture notes, assigned readings, and other media) to introduce new material, and we’ll use the assignments to reinforce that material and evaluate your progress.
While we hope you enjoy this course, we will only be present for a small minority of your lifelong learning. Therefore, we have done our best to build assignments and lectures that show you how to find documentation, read code, and carry out small experiments on your own so that you can continue to broaden your knowledge long after this course has ended. We believe this ability is just as important to your success as anything we can teach you directly.
Note: This is a relatively new course, written from scratch and being taught for the second time. Some things might feel rough, slightly out-of-order, or poorly scheduled. When this happens, please let us know on Piazza. Your feedback will help us shape future iterations of the course.
Academic Integrity
TL;DR: Do all of your own work. This course will necessarily involve a lot of searching and reading. Skipping the work will only make your life easier in the short term. Don’t use LLMs such as ChatGPT.
You are expected to adhere to NEU’s Academic Integrity Policy in this course. Plagiarism of code or answers to assignments is strictly prohibited, as is sharing answers with or accepting answers from others.
You are allowed to reference Linux man pages and any open source projects while completing assignments. You are also allowed to read any internet resource, with the exception of material outside this website that explicitly pertains to this course (e.g. assignment solutions accidentally shared by a former student). However, no matter what resources you reference, you must not plagiarise or complete a substantial part of an assignment using someone else’s work, even if you credit that work.
You are, however, allowed to base your answers on information you find online. The purpose of this course is to learn, so if you find a useful resource that clarifies a misunderstanding or explains a tricky topic and in doing so gives you the knowledge you need to complete an assignment, you are welcome to read it (and share it with other students)! You may even copy short snippets of code from examples you find online, given that either 1) you cite your source, or 2) the snippet is something that couldn’t reasonably be implemented any other way (e.g. a call to a Linux API function that we have asked you to use).
To cite your source, leave a reference to it that is enough for the reader to easily find the resource. If the source is a webpage, give the full URL. If the source is a print book, give the title, author, and edition. Use your common sense here.
As a rule of thumb, it’s okay to look for resources to answer specific questions that come up while you are working on an assignment, but it’s not okay to look for resources to avoid having to work on the assignment at all.
In the former case, you may end up copying or retyping small snippets of code from the resources you find. If what you copy has no originality (e.g. if you look up the name of a specific function or command-line flag) and so serves only as an expression of thoughts you already had, no attribution is needed. However, if what you copy affected your thinking about how to go about solving the problem (e.g. by using a command in a way you hadn’t considered before), you should cite your source. Either way, things like this are generally okay and won’t affect your grade.
What’s not okay is copying a function, program, or command that solves a substantial portion of the problem we’ve given you, regardless of whether you attribute it. You are graded on what you bring to the course, and if the course staff believes that you did not bring your own originality and problem-solving skills to an assignment, you will receive a failing grade for that assignment. Additionally, if you don’t attribute the unoriginal code, you will be guilty of plagiarism and the extra consequences that entails.
Grading
You will be evaluated 100% on homework assignments. Your final percentage grade will be the average (mean) of your individual grades for each of the 8 assignments. We may decide to adjust (i.e. curve) the grades of any individual assignment if we deem it necessary, and in that case the curved value is what will go into the average. A curve will never decrease your grade for an assignment.
Your final letter grade will be computed from your final percentage grade using the cutoffs outlined here. (We know that’s a Tufts math department page, but their scheme closely matches that which most students expect, and the computer science department doesn’t have a recommended set of cutoffs documented anywhere.)
Often on homework assignments we will ask you questions as part of an
“investigative” assignment. The purpose of these questions is to guide you
through a learning process and teach you how to find things out for yourself.
You should explain “why” or “how” in your answers to demonstrate your process.
This is similar to “showing your work” for math. For example, if a question
asks, “how many files are in the directory?”, we would expect you to say “42. I
found the answer with ls -l | wc -l” or similar. Just responding “42” would
not be enough.
Submitting assignments
You must submit projects electronically following the instructions given in class. Projects may not be submitted by any other means (e.g., please do not email your projects to us). It is your responsibility to test your program and verify that it works properly before submitting. All projects are due at 11:59pm on the day indicated on the project assignment, according to the submission server’s internal clock. Your project score will be for the last version of the project you submit.
Late policy
Please don’t submit late homework. The summer term is too compressed. If you miss the deadline but would still like to submit it, it will be opportunistically graded on a case-by-case basis.
You have two late tokens that you can use during the semester. Using one late
token allows you to submit one project up to 24 hours late with no penalty. You
may also use your two late tokens together to submit one project up to 48 hours
late with no penalty. Contact a TA if you need to check the status of your late
tokens.
Contributors
We consulted Ming Chow, Mike Shah, Chris Gregg, Mark Sheldon, Tyler Lubeck, and Lexi Galantino while developing this course.
We borrowed the “Assignments” submission guidelines from Jeff Foster’s CS 121 syllabus.
These similar courses from other institutions inspired elements of this course:
- MIT’s missing semester
- Berkeley’s EECS201
- Berkeley’s CS9E
