Summary
Every year there's a new practice lab on software development offered. In workgroups sized
around ten students a formal product specification has to be analyzed, a corresponding piece of
software needs to be created and finalized for later review and assessment. You learn about distributed
programming, teamwork and complex debugging. The major challenges while the lab is running are
coordination, project management, timing and of course meeting other developers' expectations: each
participant's knowledge and skills vary. So it's difficult for each of them to take responsibility of
appropriate parts of the future product for implementation.
The programming language also might change from year to year, so plan your schedule carefully if you
don't want to learn a coding language just to complete this lab.
Testing requirements
In 2001 the examination regulations required each student of computer science to pass a lab
on software development (which in my eyes still makes sense). In later years a more flexible
"non-development" lab was allowed, too.
Practice lab |
| 01585 |
Software development lab
in semester of winter 2001/2002, hosted by faculty Informatik IV (Prof. Güting) |
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This lab was about routing and navigation systems. To be more specific, we were
asked to create a digital mobile city guide and routing assistant:
a program to be used on PDA mobile devices with GPRS antenna. It should guide
you to points of interest like museums, churches, restaurants and to other people
(moving objects) and create a route using public transportation and by walking.
A real-world implementation might offer public kiosks where you may dock your
device for loading the required regional city maps and POI information into the
software product.
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Based on the java language we need to create
- an interactive map editor to create the navigation data including public transportation and roads,
- an interactive navigation module (the "city guide") that accepts a predefined command language to create routing queries,
- a locator component that allows individual user tracking and queries on their positioning.
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| When planning to participate in the lab, make sure you have enough time for up to six months! It's
extremely time-consuming and there's just little chance to succeed in attending other classes the same time.
Before registering you also need to pass the exam on Software engineering I!
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The product
